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LITER ART HIS TORT 



A Literary History of America 



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Contents 



Page 

INTRODUCTION i 

BOOK I 

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

I. English History from 1600 to 1700 13 

II. English Literature from 1600 to 1700 20 

III. American History from 1600 to 1700 26 

IV. Literature in America from 1600 to 1700 ... 35 
V. Cotton Mather 44 

VI. Summary . . 55 

BOOK II 

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

I. English History from 1700 to 1800 59 

II. English Literature from 1700 to 1800 .... 65 

III. American History from 1700 to 1800 70 

IV. Literature in America from 1700 to 1776 ... 78 
V. Jonathan Edwards 83 

VI. Benjamin Franklin 92 

VII. The American Revolution 104 

VIII. Literature in America from 1776 to 1800 . . . 117 

IX. Summary 136 



X CONTENTS 

BOOK III 

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

Page 

I. English History since 1800 139 

II. English Literature since 1800 145 

III. American History since 1800 149 

IV. Literature in America since 1800 . 154 

BOOK IV 

LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE STATES FROM 
1798 TO 1857 

I. Charles Brockden Brown 157 

II. Washington Irving 169 

III. James Fenimore Cooper 181 

IV. William Cullen Bryant 193 

V. Edgar Allan Poe 204 

VI. The Knickerbocker School 219 

BOOK V 

THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

I. Some General Characteristics of New England . 233 

II. The New England Orators 246 

III. The New England Scholars and Historians . . . 260 

IV. Unitarianism 277 

V. Transcendentalism 290 

VI. Ralph Waldo Emerson 311 

VII. The Lesser Men of Concord 328 

VIII. The Antislavery Movement , 339 



CONTENTS xi 

BOOK V {Continued) 

Page 

IX. John Greenleaf Whittier 3^8 

X. The "Atlantic Monthly" 370 

XI. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 378 

XII. James Russell Lowell 393 

XIII. Oliver Wendell Holmes 407 

XIV. Nathaniel Hawthorne 425 

XV. The Decline of New England 436 

BOOK VI 
THE REST OF THE STORY 

I. New York since 1857 449 

II. Walt Whitman 465 

III. Literature in the South . 480 

IV. The West 500 

V. The Present Time 514 

CONCLUSION . . szi 

AUTHORITIES AND REFERENCES 533 

NOTE 555 

INDEX 559 



A Literary History of America 



A Literary History of America 



INTRODUCTION 



Literature, like its most excellent phase, poetry, has never 
been satisfactorily defined. In essence it is too subtle, too 
elusive, too vital, to be confined within the limits of phrase. 
Yet everybody vaguely knows what it is. Everybody knows 
that human life, in its endless, commonplace, unfathomable 
complexity, impresses human beings in ways which vary not 
only with individuals, but with the generations and the nations. 
Somewhere in the oldest English writings there is an allegory 
which has never faded. Of a night, it tells us, a little group 
was gathered about the fireside in a hall where the flicker of 
flame cast light on some and threw others into shadow, but 
none into shadow so deep as the darkness without. And into 
the window from the midst of the night flew a swallow lured 
by the light ; but unable by reason of his wildness to linger 
among men, he sped across the hall and so out again into the 
dark, and was seen no more. To this day, as much as when 
the old poet first saw or fancied it, the swallow's flight remains 
an image of earthly life. From whence we know not, we come 
into the wavering light and gusty warmth of this world ; but 
here the law of our being forbids that we remain. A little we 
may see, fancying that we understand, — the hall, the lords 
and the servants, the chimney and the feast ; more we may 
feel, — the light and the warmth, the safety and the danger, 
the hope and the dread. Then we must forth again, into the 



2 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

voiceless, unseen eternities. But the fleeting moments of life, 
like the swallow's flight once more, are not quite voiceless j as 
surely as he may twitter in the ears of men, so men themselves 
may give sign to one another of what they think they know, and 
of what they know they feel. More too ; men have learned 
to record these signs, so that long after they are departed, 
others may guess what their life meant. These records are 
often set forth in terms which may be used only by those 
of rarely special gift and training, — the terms of architecture 
and sculpture, of painting and music ; but oftener and more 
freely they are phrased in the terms which all men learn 
somehow to use, — the terms of language. Some of these 
records, and most, are of so little moment that they are soon 
neglected and forgotten ; others, like the fancied story of the 
swallow, linger through the ages. It is to these that we give 
the name of literature. Literature is the lasting expression in 
words of the meaning of life. 

Any definition is the clearer for examples. To make sure 
of ours, then, we may well recall a few names which un- 
doubtedly illustrate it. The Psalms are literature, so is the 
Iliad, so are the Epistles of Saint Paul, so is the iEneid, and the 
Divine Comedy, and Don Quixote, and Hamlet. These icw 
names are enough to remind us not only of what literature is, 
but also of the fact which most distinguishes it from other arts 
of expression. The lines and colours which embody architec- 
ture, sculpture, and painting, can be understood by anybody 
with eyes. Though to people like ourselves, who have grown 
up amid the plastic traditions of classical antiquity and the Italian 
Renaissance, an Egyptian painting or a Japanese print looks 
odd, it remains, even to us, comprehensible. The Psalms, on 
the other hand, were written in Hebrew, the Iliad and the 
Epistles in dialects of Greek, the ^Eneid was written in Latin, 
the Divine Comedy m Italian, Don Quixote in Spanish, and 
Hamlet in Elizabethan English ; except through the unsatis- 
factory medium of translation one and all must be sealed 



INTRODUCTION 3 

books to those who do not know the languages native to the 
men who phrased them. World-old legends, after all, are 
the wisest i the men who fled from Babel could each see in 
the deserted tower a monument of impious aspiration, but this 
thought of each was sealed from the rest by the confusion of 
tongues. So to this day literature is of all fine arts the most 
ineradicably national. 

Here again we come to a word so simple and so frequent 
that an important phase of its meaning is often overlooked. 
Nationality is generally conceived to be a question of race, of 
descent, of blood ; and yet in human experience there is a cir- 
cumstance perhaps more potent in binding men together than 
any physical tie. That old legend of Babel tells the story. 
The confusion of tongues broke every bond of common kinship ; 
the races which should hold together through the centuries 
sprang afresh from men who newly spoke and newly thought 
and newly felt in terms of common language. For these lan- 
guages which we speak grow more deeply than anything else to 
be a part of our mental habit who use them. It is in terms of 
language that we think even about the commonplaces of life, 
— what we shall eat, what we shall wear, whom we shall care 
for ; in terms of language too, and in no others, we formulate 
the ideals which consciously, and perhaps still more uncon- 
sciously, guide our conduct and our aspirations. In a strange, 
subtle way each language grows to associate with itself the 
ideals and the aspirations and the fate of those peoples with 
whose life it is inextricably intermingled. 

Languages grow and live and die in accordance with laws 
of their own, not perfectly understood, which need not now 
detain us. This English of ours, with which alone we are 
immediately concerned, may be taken as typical. Originating, 
one can hardly say precisely when or how, from the union and 
confusion of older tongues, it has struggled through the infan- 
tile diseases of dialect, each of which has left some trace, until 
long ago it not only had become the sole means of expression 



4 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

for millions of people, but also had assumed the literary form 
which now makes its literature in some respects the most 
considerable of modern times. Whatever else, this literature 
is the most spontaneous, the least formal and conscious, the 
most instinctively creative, the most free from the rankness 
and the debility of extreme culture, and so seemingly the most 
normal. Its earliest forms were artless ; songs and sayings 
began to stray from oral tradition into written record, laws 
were sometimes phrased and chronicles made in the robust 
young terms which carried meaning to unlearned folks as well 
as to those versed in more polite tongues. By and by came 
forms of literature which at least comparatively were artistic, 
influenced by an impulse of writers and of readers too towards 
expression for expression's sake. The earliest of these which 
has lasted in general literary memory reached its height in the 
work of Chaucer. After his time came a century or more of 
civil disturbance, when Englishmen were too busy with wars 
of the Roses and the like for further progress in the arts of 
peace. Then, with the new national integrity which grew 
under the Tudors, came a fresh and stronger literary impulse, 
unsurpassed in vigorous spontaneity. 

In 1575 there was hardly such a thing as modern English 
literature; in 1625 that great body of English literature which 
we call Elizabethan was complete. Fifty years had given us 
not only incomparable lyric verse and the final version of the 
Bible, but the work too of Spenser, of Shakspere and the other 
great dramatists, of Hooker, of Ralegh, of Bacon, and of all 
their fellows. Among these, of course, Shakspere stands su- 
preme, just as Chaucer stood among his contemporaries whose 
names are now forgotten by all but special scholars ; and one 
feature of Shakspere's supremacy is that his literary career was 
normal. Whoever has followed it from his experimental be- 
ginning, through the ripeness to which he brought comedy, 
history, and tragedy alike, to its placid close amid the growing 
languor of freshly established tradition, will have learned some- 



INTRODUCTION 5 

thing more than even the great name of Shakspere includes, — ^ 
he will have had a glimpse of the natural law which not 
only governed the course of Shakspere himself and of Eliza- 
bethan literature, but has governed in the past and will govern 
in the future the growth, development, and decline of all 
literature and of all fine art whatsoever. Lasting literature has 
its birth when a creative impulse, which we may call imagi- 
native, moves men to break the shackles of tradition, making 
things which have not been before ; sooner or later this im- 
pulse is checked by a growing sense of the inexorable limits 
of fact and of language ; and then creative imagination sinks 
into some new tradition, to be broken only when, in time to 
come, the vital force of imagination shall revive. 

As English literature has grown into maturity, the working 
of this law throughout its course has become evident. The 
first impulse, we have seen, gave us the work of Chaucer j 
the second, which came only after generations, gave us the 
Elizabethan lyrics and dramas, Spenser and Shakspere, and 
the final form of the English Bible. This last is probably the 
greatest masterpiece of translation in the world; it has ex- 
ercised on the thought and the language of English-speaking 
people an influence which cannot be overestimated. As a 
translation, however, it rather indicates how eager Elizabethan 
Englishmen were to know the splendours of world-old liter- 
ature, than reveals a spontaneous impulse towards native ex- 
pression. Apart from this supreme work, the fully developed 
literature of the Elizabethan period took on the whole the 
form of poetry ; that of the eighteenth century, on the other 
hand, took on the whole the form of prose ; and as English 
prose literature has developed, no phase of it has developed 
more highly than its fiction. Vaguely general though this 
statement be, it is perhaps enough to indicate an important 
general tendency. The first form in which the normal liter- 
ature of any language develops is instinctively poetic ; prose 
comes later; and prose fiction, that intricate combination of 



6 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

poetic impulse with prosaic form, comes later still. In 1625 
English literature was fully developed only in the forms of lyric 
and dramatic poetry. 

It was about this time that the America with which we 
shall be concerned came into existence. It began with a 
number of mutually independent settlements, each of which 
grew inta something like political integrity. When the Con- 
stitution of the United States was adopted, somewhat more than 
a hundred years ago, the sentiment of local sovereignty in the 
separate States was accordingly too strong to allow the federal 
power to assume an independent name. As the power thus 
founded developed into one of the most considerable in modern 
history, its citizens found themselves driven by this unique fact 
of national namelessness to a custom which, if misunderstood, 
is often held presumptuous ; they called themselves Ameri- 
cans, a name geographically proper to all natives of the West- 
ern Hemisphere, from Canada to Patagonia. By this time 
the custom thus historically established has given to the name 
" America " the sense in which we generally use it. The 
America with whose literary history we are to be concerned 
is only that part of the American continent which is dominated 
by the English-speaking people now subject to the govern- 
ment of the United States. 

A literary history of America, then, should concern itself 
with such lasting expressions in words of the meaning of life 
as this people has uttered during" its three centuries of 
growingly independent existence ; or, in simpler terms, with 
what America has contributed to the literature of the English 
language. 

Accidents of chronology though the centuries cf any era must 
be, they prove in such study as ours convenient divisions of 
time, at once easy to remember and characteristically distinct. 
In the history of America, at least, each century has traits of its 
own. In 1600 there was no such thing as English-speaking 
America; in 1700 all but one of the colonies which have 



INTRODUCTION 7 

developed into the United States were finally established, and 
the English conquest of the middle colonies founded by the 
Dutch or the Swedes was virtually complete. In 1700 every 
one of the American colonies was loyally subject to the gov- 
ernment of King William III.; in 1800 there remained 
throughout them no vestige of British authority. In 1800, 
the last complete year of the presidency of John Adams, the 
United States were still an experiment in government of which 
the result remained in doubt; the year 1900 has found them, 
whatever else, a power which seems as established and as 
important as any in the world. Clearly these three centuries 
of American history are at least as distinct as three generations 
in any race. 

Again, though the political crises which decided the dis' 
tinct features of these centuries were far from coincident with 
the centuries themselves, the typical American character of 
the seventeenth century differed from that of the eighteenth, 
and that of the eighteenth from that of the nineteenth, as 
distinctly as the historical limits of these centuries differed 
one from the other. In the seventeenth century the typical 
American, a man of English-speaking race, seemed to him- 
self an immigrant hardly at home in the remote regions where 
his exiled life was perforce to be passed. In the eighteenth 
century the typical American, still English at heart, was so 
far in descent from the immigration that almost unawares his 
personal ties with the mother country had been broken. By 
tradition, perhaps, he knew from what part of the old world 
his ancestors had come, but that old home itself had probably 
both lost all such traditions of those ancestors and ceased to 
feel even curiosity about their descendants. For better or 
worse, this new America had become the only real home ot 
its natives. In the nineteenth century the typical American, 
politically as well as personally independent of the old world, 
and English only so far as the traditions inseparable from an- 
cestral law and language must keep him so, has often felt or 



8 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

fancied himself less at one with contemporary Englishmen 
than with Europeans of other and essentially foreign blood. 

Yet, English or not, we Americans are English-speaking 
still ; and English-speaking we must always remain. An 
accident of language and nothing more, this fact may seem 
to many. To those who think more deeply it can hardly fail 
to mean that for better or worse the ideals which underlie our 
blundering conscious life must always be the ideals which 
underlie the conscious life of the mother country, and which 
for centuries have rectified and purified her blunders. Morally 
and religiously these ideals are immortally consecrated in King 
James's version of the Bible ; legally and politically these 
ideals are grouped in that great legal system which, in distinc- 
tion from the Canon Law or the Civil, may broadly be called 
the Common Law of England. What these ideals are, every 
one bred in the traditions of our ancestral language instinctively 
knows ; but such knowledge is hard to phrase. Perhaps we 
come as near as may be to truth when we say that in their 
moral aspect the ideals which underlie our language are com- 
prised in a profound conviction that, whatever our station or 
our shortcomings, each of us is bound to do right; and that 
in their legal aspect these ideals may similarly be summarised 
m the statement that we are bound on earth to maintain our 
rights. But the rights contemplated by our ancestral law are 
no abstract ones ; they are those which the gradually varying 
custom and experience of the centuries have proved in actual 
exercise to be safely favourable to the public and private wel- 
fare of men like ourselves. 

Vague and general as all this may seem, it has lately come 
to possess significance hardly paralleled since at the beginning 
of our Christian era the imperial power, the law and the lan- 
guage, of Rome dominated what was then the world. Our law 
and our language, our ideals and our vital energies, which had 
their earliest origin in England, are at this moment struggling 
for world-existence with what else in ideals, in law, and in Ian- 



INTRODUCTION 9 

guage have developed themselves otherwise in modern time. 
Yet for a century or more the two great English-speaking 
races, the native English and that of independent America, have 
been so disunited that each has often seemed to the other more 
hostile than many an alien. There are no feuds fiercer than 
the feuds of kindred. As we pursue our study, we shall per- 
haps see how this breach between the two branches of our 
race has grown. In brief, from the first settlement of Virginia 
until the moment when the guns of Admiral Dewey brought 
America unawares but fatally face to face with the problem 
of Asiatic empire, there has never been an instant when to 
native Englishmen and to English-speaking Americans the 
great political problems have presented themselves in the same 
terms. To-day at last there is little difference. To-day, then, 
the disunion of sympathy which for a century and more has 
kept Americans apart from the native English takes on world- 
wide significance. 

An important phase of our study must accordingly be that 
which attempts to trace and to understand the changes in the 
native character of the Americans and of the English, which 
so long resulted in disunion of national sentiment. We can 
scrutinise them, however, only as they appear in literary 
history, and mostly in that of America. For our chief business 
concerns only the question of what contributions America has 
made, during its three centuries, to the literature of the Eng- 
lish language. 

Recurring to our rough, convenient division of native 
Americans into the three types which correspond to these three 
centuries of American history, we can instantly perceive that 
only the last, the Americans of the nineteenth century, have 
produced literature of any importance. The novelists and the 
historians, the essayists and the poets, whose names come to 
mind when American literature is mentioned, have all flourished 
since 1800. The greater part of our study, then, must con- 
cern the century just at an end. For all that, the two earlier 



lo LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

centuries were not sterile ; rather indeed the amount of native 
American writing which each produced is surprising. What 
is more, the American writings of the eighteenth century dif- 
fered from those of the seventeenth quite as distinctly as did 
the American history or the American character. Of both cen- 
turies, meanwhile, two things are true : neither in itself pre- 
sents much literary variety, and most of what was pubHshed in 
each has already been forgotten. Our task, then, is becoming 
plainer ; it is to glance at the literary history of America dur- 
ing the seventeenth century and the eighteenth, and to study, 
with what detail proves possible, that literary history during the 
past hundred years. 

From all this, too, an obvious method of proceeding begins 
to define itself. Taking each century in turn, we may con- 
veniently begin by reminding ourselves briefly of what it con- 
tributed to the history and to the literature of England. With 
this in mind we may better understand a similar but more 
minute study of America during each of the three periods in 
question. When we come to the last and most important of 
these, the nineteenth century, we may find ourselves a little 
troubled by the fact that so much of it is almost contemporary 
with ourselves. Contemporary life is never quite ripe for 
history j facts cannot at once range themselves in true per- 
spective ; and when these facts are living men and women, 
there is a touch of inhumanity in writing of them as if we had 
already had the misfortune to lose them. In these straits one 
decision seems unavoidable, — so far as our study concerns in- 
dividuals, we must confine it to those who are no longer liv- 
ing. Unhappily the list has so swollen that these should 
prove quite enough for our main purpose. For this, we 
should constantly remember, is chiefly to discern what, if any- 
thing, America has so far contributed to the literature of our 
ancestral English language. 



BOOK I 

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 



BOOK I 
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

I 

ENGLISH HISTORY FROM 160O TO I7OO 

Whatever else people remember about seventeenth-century 
England, they w^ill pretty surely know the names of the sover- 
eigns who came to the throne. In 1600 the reign of Queen 
Elizabeth was drawing to its close. After her came the 
pragmatic Scotchman, James I. After him came Charles I., 
whose tragic fate has combined with the charm of his portraits 
to make him at least a pathetically romantic hero. Then 
came Cromwell, quite as sovereign in his fleeting Common- 
wealth as ever king was in monarchy. Then came Charles 
II., with all the license of the Restoration j then James II., 
ousted in less than five years by the Glorious Revolution ; 
finally came the Dutch Prince of Orange with his Eng- 
lish Queen, royal in England only by glorious revolutionary 
grace. Seven sovereigns in all we find, if we count WiUiam 
and Mary together; and of these only six were technically 
royal. Of the six royalties, four were Stuarts, who came in 
the middle of the list ; and the Stuart dynasty was broken 
midway by the apparition of Cromwell, the one English 
sovereign not of royal blood and dignity. Literally, then, 
Cromwell may be termed the central figure of English history 
during the seventeenth century. 

It is in the full literary spirit of that period to remark this 
fantastic fact as If It were significant, saying that just as 



14 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Cromwell stands central in the list of those who during the 
seventeenth century of our Christian era were sovereign in 
Protestant England, so in the eyes of them who seek among 
these a fitting centre for their thoughts and meditations he 
proves central too. Love him or hate him, reverence or 
detest his memory, one fact you must grant : never before in 
English history had men seen dominant the type of which 
he is the great representative ; never since his time have 
they again seen that dominant type, now irrevocably van- 
ished with the world which brought it forth, — the type of 
the dominant Puritan. 

The Puritan character, of course, is too permanently Eng- 
lish to be confined to any single period of English history. 
Throughout English records we may find it, first gathering the 
force which led to its momentary sovereignty, and later, even 
to our own time, aff^ecting the whole course of English life 
and thought. In the seventeenth century, however, Puritanism 
for a while acquired the unique importance of national domi- 
nance, which it proved politically unable to maintain beyond 
the lifetime of its chief exponent. A religious system, one 
generally thinks it ; and rightly, for it was profoundly actuated 
by conscious religious motives, and by passionate devotion to 
that system of Christian theology which is known by the name 
of Calvin. A political movement, too, it often seems ; and 
rightly, for never in the course of English history have native 
Englishmen so striven to alter the form and the course of 
constitutional development. In such a study as ours it has 
both aspects ; the dominance of Puritanism may best be thought 
of as the period when for a little while the moral and religious 
ideals which underlie our language were uppermost, when for 
once the actuating impulse of authority was rather that the 
will of God should be done on earth than that any custom — 
however fortified and confirmed by the experience formulated in 
the Common Law — should for its own sake be maintained. 

That the will of God should be done, on earth as it is in 



ENGLISH HISTORY 15 

Heaven, no good Englishman will ever deny. What the 
will of God is, on the other hand, when directly concerned 
with the matters of this world, even good Englishmen cannot 
always agree. Among the Puritans themselves there was 
plenty of dissension, but one thing seems fairly sure, — no 
good Puritan questioned the truth of Calvinism any more than 
good Catholics of to-day question the dogmas of an QEcumen- 
ical Council. To understand Puritanism, then, in England and 
in America alike, we must remind ourselves of what Calvinistic 
theology taught. 

In the beginning, the Puritans held, God created man, 
responsible to Him, with perfect freedom of will. Adam, in 
the fall, exerted his will in opposition to the will of God ; 
thereby Adam and all his posterity merited eternal punish- 
ment. As a mark of that punishment they lost the power of 
exerting their will in harmony with the will of God, without 
losing their hereditary responsibility to Him. But God, in 
His infinite mercy, was pleased to mitigate His justice. 
Through the mediation of Christ, certain human beings, 
chosen at God's pleasure, might be relieved of the just 
penalty of sin, and received into everlasting salvation. These 
were the elect ; none others could be saved, nor could any 
acts of the elect impair their salvation. Now, there were no 
outward and visible marks by which the elect might be 
known ; there was a fair chance that any human being to 
whom the gospel was brought might be of the number. The 
thmg which most vitally concerned every man, then, was to 
discover whether he were elect, and so free from the just 
penalty of sin, ancestral and personal. The test of election 
was ability to exert the will in true harmony with the will of 
God, — a proof of emancipation from the hereditary curse of 
the children of Adam ; whoever could do right, and wish to, 
had a fair ground for hope that he should be saved. But 
even the elect were infected with the hereditary sin or 
humanity ; and, besides, no wile of the Devil was more 



1 6 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

frequent than that which deceived men into believing them- 
selves regenerate when in truth they were not. The task of 
assuring one's self of election could end only with life, — a 
life of passionate aspirations, ecstatic enthusiasms, profound 
discouragements. Above all, men must never forget that the 
true will of God was revealed, directly or by implication, 
only and wholly in Scripture ; incessant study of Scripture 
was the sole means by which any man could assure himself 
that his will was really exerting itself, through the mediatory 
power of Christ, in true harmony with the will of God. 

Calvinism this creed is commonly called, in memory of the 
French reformer, who in modern times has been its chief ex- 
ponent ; but those learned in theology tell us that perhaps we 
might better call it the system of Saint Augustine. Augustine 
and Calvin alike are remembered chiefly, perhaps wholly, as 
theologians ; and in this age, whose most characteristic en- 
ergies are devoted to researches which may be confirmed by 
observation or experiment, theology generally seems intangibly 
remote from workaday life. Yet, strangely enough, the con- 
ceptions which underlie the most popular scientific philosophy 
of our own time have much in common with those which 
actuated both Augustine and Calvin. Earthly life, the mod- 
ern evolutionists hold, consists in a struggle for existence 
wherein only the fittest can survive ; for every organism 
which persists, myriads must irretrievably perish. In the days 
when Calvin pondered on the eternities, and still more in 
those tragic days of toppling empire when Augustine strove 
to imprison divine truth within the limits of earthly language, 
science was still to come. But what Augustine and Calvin 
saw, in the human affairs whence each alike inferred the sys- 
tems of Heaven and Hell, was really what the modern evo- 
lutionists perceive in every aspect of Nature, Total depravity 
is only a theological name for that phase of life which in less 
imaeinative times we name the strua:o;le for existence ; and 



tob 



likewise election is onlv a theological name for what oui 



ENGLISH HISTORY 17 

newer fashion calls the survival of the fittest. Old-world 
theology and modern science alike strive to explain facts 
which have been and shall be so long as humanity casts its 
shadow in the sunshine. 

Now, any struggle is bound to be at its fiercest where the 
struggling forces are most concentrated. In human affairs, 
both good and evil struggle hardest where human beings are 
most densely congregated. Augustine wrote amid the dying 
throes of antiquity, in a world still formally dominated by 
that imperial power of Rome whose true health and strength 
were gone, Calvin wrote in the populous Europe of the 
Renaissance, where at once the whole system of mediaeval life 
was doomed, and the pitiless pressure of economic fact was 
already forcing the more adventurous spirits of every European 
race to seek an outlet for their energy in the unexplored con- 
tinents of our Western Hemisphere. Noble, too, though we 
may find the traditions of that merry old England, which was so 
vital under Queen Elizabeth, which faded under the first two 
Stuarts, and which vanished in the smoke of the Civil Wars, 
the plain records, both of history and of literature, show it to 
have been a dense, wicked old world, whose passions ran high 
and deep, and whose vices and crimes, big as its brave old 
virtues, were truly such as to make the grim dogmas of the 
Puritans seem to many earnest minds the only explanation of 
so godless a fact as human life. 

God's will be done on earth, then, the Puritans cried, 
honestly conceiving this divine will to demand the political 
dominance of God's elect. The society over which they 
believed that these elect should make themselves politically 
dominant had all the complexity which must develop itself dur- 
ing centuries of national and social growth ; and this growth, 
fortified by the uncodified, unwritten, impregnable Common 
Law of England, had taken through the centuries an earthly 
course at variance with what the Puritans held to be their 

divinely sanctioned politics. Towards the end of Cromwell's 

2 



1 8 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

dominance, then, they tried to mend matters by giving Eng- 
land a written constitution.^ In many respects this Instrument 
of Government seems theoretically better than the older system 
which had grown under the unwritten Common Law, and 
which since Cromwell's time has developed after its own 
fashion into the Parliamentary government now controlling the 
British Empire. The Instrument of Government, however, 
had a mortal weakness : it was not historically continuous 
with the past ; and this was enough to prevent any historical 
continuity with the future. The struggle for political existence 
in England was inevitably fatal to principles and ideals so little 
rooted in national life as those which the Puritans in their wise 
folly hopefully, yet hopelessly formulated. So in England, after 
the momentary irruption of dominant Puritanism, the old 
Common Law surged back ; and it has flowed on to the 
present day, the stronger if not the nobler of the two forces 
which the history of our native language compels us to admit 
as the ideals of our race. 

By most constitutional lawyers, then, the dominance of 
Puritanism personified in Cromwell has been held an acci- 
dental and almost unimportant disease which may be neglected 
in considering the life history of the English Constitution. 
How far this view is right, we need not trouble ourselves to 
inquire ; constitutional history is not within our province. 
What more concerns us is a fact which general readers of 
the social history of England during the seventeenth century 
can hardly fail to remark, perhaps more certainly than thorough 
students whose attention is rightly, but often bewilderingly, 
encumbered by detail. The records which remain to us of 
Elizabethan England, and of the England which finally broke 
into civil war, seem records of a remote past. Take, for exam- 
ple, almost at random, three names : those of the adventurer, 
Ralegh ; of the soldier and courtier, Essex ; and, a little later, 

^ The line of thought here set forth was suggested by one of Mr. A. V 
Dicey's Lowell Institute lectures, in the autumn of 1898. 



ENGLISH HISTORY 19 

of that most chivalrous of autobiographers, Lord Herbert of 
Cherbury. All three are marked by a big, simple, youthful 
spontaneity, different at once from any general trait of modern 
times and from those which are common to every period of 
history. Take, equally at random, three other names which 
belong to the years after Cromwell's dominant Puritanism had 
failed ; Monk, the first Duke of Albemarle ; Samuel Pepys, 
the diarist; and John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough. 
Though this last little group seem by no means contemporary 
with ourselves, yet, in comparison with the elder group, they 
seem almost modern, — old-fashioned men rather than men of 
an earlier type than those we live with. The contrast is deeply 
typical. The England which came before the dominant Puri- 
tanism of Cromwell, the England to which we may broadly 
give, as we often give to its literature, the name " Elizabethan," 
vanished when Puritan dominance broke for a while the pro- 
gress of English constitutional law ; the England which came 
afterwards, whatever its merits or its faults, lacked, as England 
has continued to lack ever since King Charles II. was re- 
stored, certain traits which we all feel in the old Elizabethan 
world. 

For our purpose there is hardly anything more important 
than to realise, if we can, what these Elizabethan traits were, 
which distinguish the England before Cromwell's time from 
that which has come after him. Perhaps we shall have 
done a little to remind ourselves of what Elizabethan England 
possessed, when we say that in the older time we can every- 
where find three characteristics which in the later time are 
more and more dimly discernible, — spontaneity, enthusiasm, 
and versatility. 



11 

ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM 160O TO I7OO 

The social history of seventeenth-century England broadly 
groups itself in three parts : that which preceded the dominant 
Puritanism of the Commonwealth ; the dominant Puritanism 
itself; and what came after. All three of these phases of 
English life found adequate expression in lasting literature. 
An easy way to remind ourselves of these literary types is 
to glance at some records of publication in England during 
the three distinct periods of the seventeenth century.^ Between 
1600 and 1605 appeared plays by Dekker, Ben Jonson, John 
Lyly, Shakspere, Marston, Middleton, Heywood, and Chap- 
man ; Fairfax's translation of Tasso, Lodge's of Josephus, and 
Florio's of Montaigne ; " England's Helicon," Campion's 
" Art of English Poetry," and Davidson's " Poetical Rhap- 
sody ; " and, among many other lesser works, the last volume 
of Hakluyt's " Voyages." Between 1648 and 1652 appeared 
works by Fuller, Herrick, Lovelace, Milton, Francis Quarles, 
Jeremy Taylor, Baxter, Bunyan, Cowley, Hobbes, Vaughan, 
Davenant, Izaak Walton, and George Herbert. Finally, be- 
tween 1695 and 1700 appeared plays by Colley Cibber, 
Southern, Congreve, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh ; and works 
of one sort or another by Bentley, Blackmore, Defoe, Evelyn, 
Garth, Lord Shaftesbury, and Dryden ; not to speak of Tate 
and Brady's version of the " Psalms." These random lists will 

1 Throughout our study, the names recorded in Ryland's " Chronologi- 
cal Outlines of English Literature," published by Macmillan, should suffice 
for such purposes as that now in mind. Though sometimes slightly inac- 
curate, this admirably useful book is always trustworthy enough to warrant 
generalisation. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 21 

define, almost as clearly as lists made with thoughtful care, the 
chief facts which we should now keep in mind. 

In the beginning of the century, even though Elizabeth's 
reign was very near its end, the literature which we call Eliza- 
bethan was at its height ; and as the generations have passed, 
we begin to see how surely its central figure, the dominant 
figure of all English literature, is that of Shakspere. In the 
middle of the century there was more confusion ; yet it takes 
no great knowledge of English letters to feel in the first place 
that the Elizabethan temper was no longer strong ; and in the 
second place, that among the men who were then writing, 
there was one who — if not so surely central — rose almost as 
superior to the rest as Shakspere was fifty years before. That 
man, of course, is Milton. In the last five years of the century, 
when the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and the Glorious 
Revolution had done their work, there was another group, less 
diverse than that of Cromwell's time, almost as homogeneous 
indeed as that of Elizabeth's, but as diff'erent from either of 
the others as the periwigs of Marlborough were from the 
jewelled caps of Walter Ralegh ; and in this last group, as in 
both the others, one figure emerged from the rest. Here that 
figure is John Dryden, the first great maker of heroic couplets, 
and the first masterly writer of what has become modern 
English prose. It is worth our while to glance in turn at 
each of these literary periods, — the periods of Shakspere, of 
Milton, and of Dryden. 

Elizabethan literature, in which Shakspere declares himself 
more and more supreme, is at once the first, and in many re- 
spects the greatest, of the schools or periods of letters which 
have come to constitute modern English literature as a whole. 
Marked throughout by the spontaneity, the enthusiasm, and 
the various versatility of the England which bred it, this period 
is clearly marked as well by the fact that it brought to final 
excellence two kinds of poetry, — the lyric, and a little later 
the dramatic. In thinking of Elizabethan literature, ther^ 



22 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

one is apt to forget that it includes noble work of other than 
poetic sort ; yet no reader of English can long forget that 
to this same school belongs the scientific work and the final 
aphorisms of Bacon. It was during the first fifteen years 
of the seventeenth century, too, that Walter Ralegh, in the 
Tower, wrote his " History of the World ; " and we have 
only to glance back at Ryland's summaries of publication to 
see what masterly translations accompanied the gradual growth 
of that final masterpiece of translation, the English Bible of 
1611. There were minor phases of literature meanwhile which 
posterity has been apt to forget ; but the name of Hakluyt, 
the collector of so many records of explorations, is still fa- 
miliar; and so perhaps is that of Richard Hooker, whose 
" Ecclesiastic Polity " remains the chief literary monument of 
religious controversy during the reign of Elizabeth. Poetry 
was first, then, and supreme ; but there was fine, noble, 
thoughtful prose in philosophy and history alike j and not less 
characteristic of the time, though far less excellent as litera- 
ture, was much matter of contemporary chronicle, like Hak- 
luyt' s " Voyages," and much religious controversy. 

Throughout this literature there is one trait which the 
lapse of three centuries, with their slow, inevitable changes 
of language, has tended to obscure. Yet whoever grows 
familiar even with the work of Shakspere by himself, and 
still more with that of his contemporaries as well, must grow 
to feel it. This is a sort of pristine alertness of mind, evi- 
dent in innumerable details of Elizabethan style. One may 
best detect it, perhaps, by committing to memory random pas- 
sages of Elizabethan literature. If the trait occurred only 
in the work of Shakspere, one might deem , it a mere fresh 
miracle of his genius j but you will find it everywhere. In 
the thinner plays, for example, of Beaumont and Fletcher, the 
words, the sentences, the lines, the cadences, are full of re- 
finements of phrase, subtleties of alliteration, swift glancing 
varieties of allusion, flashes alike of sentiment and of wit. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 23 

somehow beyond the instant perception of any English-born 
modern mind. Yet it is no mere juggling with words to 
say that the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Shakspere, 
and of all the dramatists, are truly plays; and plays are 
meant not for such serious study as the excellence of these 
has compelled from posterity, but rather to give such in- 
stant emotional pleasure as theatres afford us to-day, and as 
we have got best during the nineteenth century in Paris. 
Such literature as the Elizabethan world has left us, in short, 
bespeaks a public whose spontaneous alertness of mind, whose 
instant perception of every subtle variety of phrase and 
allusion, was more akin to that of our contemporary French 
than to anything which we are now accustomed to consider 
native to insular England. Elizabethan literature bears wit- 
ness throughout to the spontaneous, enthusiastic versatility 
which the English temperament possessed in the spacious 
Elizabethan days. 

By the middle of the century, after the convulsions of the 
Civil Wars, this trait had begun to fade out of English letters. 
Our brief list of mid-century publications revealed Milton, not 
as the chief of a school, but rather as the one great figure who 
subsisted amid a group of excellently deliberate minor poets 
and elaborate makers of overwrought rhetorical prose, often 
splendid, but never simple. Fuller, Taylor, and Walton fairly 
typify seventeenth-century prose; to complete our impression 
of it we might glance back at Burton, whose " Anatomy of 
Melancholy " appeared in 162 1, and at Sir Thomas Browne, 
whose " Religio Medici" was in 1650 less than ten years old. 
In Milton's time, except for Milton himself, the creative 
impulse which had made Elizabethan literature so vital had 
subsided. The English imagination seemed checked by a 
variously developed sense of the inexorable limits of fact and 
of language. One term by which we may characterise this 
mid-century English literature, to distinguish it from the 
elder, is the term " deliberate." Mysteriously but certainly 



24 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

the old spontaneity and versatility of the Elizabethan mind 
had disappeared. 

Deliberate, indeed, is an epithet which may help us to de- 
fine the impression made by Milton himself. Throughout his 
poetry, even of that earlier period when in so many aspects 
he was still almost Elizabethan, one may often feel him tend- 
ing toward his later poetic contemporaries in the conscious 
carefulness of his art ; and surely in the great epic work of his 
later years, when solitary and alone he strove to give artistic 
expression to the dominant ideals of a Puritanism whose earthly 
hopes were as lost as ever Paradise was to our erring fathers, 
one feels amid his all but unequalled power a colossal de- 
liberation. In the prose work which intervened between these 
two periods of his poetic production, there is incisive swiftness 
of thought and phrase, but on the whole its effect is hardly 
more marked by grimly passionate asperity of temper than by 
an almost conscious ponderousness of phrase. The literature 
of Cromwell's England was as different from that of Elizabeth's 
as Cromwell was from Walter Ralegh. The names of Shak- 
spere and Milton tell the story. 

The name of Dryden is as different from that of Milton as 
Milton's is from Shakspere's. Though Dryden's " Astraea 
Redux " was published seven years before " Paradise Lost," 
Dryden died in 1700 amid a literature whose poetry had 
cooled into something like the rational form which deadened 
it throughout the century to come, and whose drama had for 
forty years been revealing fresh phases of decadent lifelessness. 
For though at least the comedies of the Restoration and of the 
years which follow seemed to contemporaries full of wit and 
vitality, few bodies of literature in the world have proved 
more evanescent, and more corrupt, artistically as well as 
morally. But if poetry and the drama were for the moment 
sleeping, — the latter seemingly for ever, the former for well- 
nigh a century to come, — there were other phases of English 
thought, if not of English feeling, which were full of life. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 25 

Boyle had done his work in chemistry ; Newton had cre- 
ated a whole range of physical science ; Locke had pro- 
duced his epoch-making Essay on Human Understanding; 
and, to go no further, the works of Sir William Temple and 
the critical essays of Dryden himself had given English prose 
its most masterly, almost its final form. 

In literature, just as in history, then, we find that the seven- 
teenth century reveals in England three distinct epochs, each 
different from the others and all together involving such 
changes in the national temperament as to make the England 
of Dryden almost as foreign to that of Shakspere as the tem- 
per of King William III. was to Queen Elizabeth's. Like 
Elizabethan England, Elizabethan literature seems different 
from anything which we can now know in the flesh. One 
can hardly imagine feeling quite at home in the Mermaid 
Tavern with Beaumont and Ben Jonson and the rest ; but in 
modern London, or at least in the London of thirty years ago, 
one might sometimes feel tljat a few steps around a grimy corner 
should still lead to some coffee-house, where glorious John 
Dryden could be found sitting in robust, old-fashioned dicta- 
torship over the laws of the language in which we ourselves 
think and speak and feel. For Dryden's England is not yet 
quite dead and gone. But dead and gone, or at least vanished 
from this earth, in Dryden's time almost as surely as in ours, 
was the elder England, whose spontaneity, whose enthusiasm, 
and whose versatility made Elizabethan literature the most 
lastingly vital record which our language shall ever phrase. 

History and literature alike, then, have shown us an Eng- 
land of the seventeenth century wherein the great central con- 
vulsion of dominant Puritanism fatally destroyed a youthful 
world, and gave us at last in its place a more deliberate, per- 
manently different new one. 



Ill 

AMERICAN HISTORY FROM 160O TO I70O 

It was in the first quarter of this seventeenth century that 
the American colonies were finally established. The first last- 
ing settlement of Virginia was made in the spring of 1607 j 
the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth towards the end of 1620 ; 
Boston was founded less than ten years later; and from 1636 
dates the oldest of native American corporations, that of 
Harvard College. At the latest of these dates the tragic reign 
of Charles I. had not half finished its course ; at the earliest 
Queen Elizabeth had lain less than five years in Westminster 
Abbey ; and these dates are less than a full generation apart. 

From these familiar facts may instantly be inferred another 
which has been comparatively neglected. To speak only of 
New England, — for in literary history New England is far more 
important than the other colonies, — we may say that every 
leading man among the first settlers both of Plymouth and of 
Massachusetts Bay was born under Queen Elizabeth herself. 
William Bradford of Plymouth, for example, was born in 
1590, the year when Spenser published the first books of the 
"Faerie Oueene ; " and Edward Winslow was born in 1595, 
when Shakspere had published only " Venus and Adonis " 
and " Lucrece." Thomas Dudley is said to have been born 
in 1576, some ten years before the execution of Mary Stuart. 
John Winthrop was born in 1588, the year of the Invincible 
Armada. John Cotton was born in 1585, the year before 
Sir Philip Sidney was killed, when for aught we know Shak- 
spere had not yet emerged from Stratford, and when surely 
John Foxe, the martyrologist, was still alive. Thomas Hooker 



AMERICAN HISTORY 27 

was born only a year later, in 1586. Richard Mather was 
only ten years younger, born in the year when Ben Jonson's 
first play is said to have been acted, when Ralegh published 
his " Discovery of Guiana," and Spenser the last three books 
of his "Faerie Queene." Roger Williams was born in 1600, 
the year which gave us the first quartos of " Henry IV.," 
" Henry V.," " The Midsummer Night's Dream," " The 
Merchant of Venice," and " Much Ado About Nothing." 
And what is thus shown true of New England is truer still 
of Virginia, founded half a generation earlier. Though the 
sovereigns to whom both northern and southern colonies owed 
their first allegiance were Stuarts, all the founders of these 
colonies were of true Elizabethan birth. 

They were not, to be sure, quite the kind of Elizabethans 
who expressed themselves in poetry. The single work pro- 
duced in America which by any stretch of language may be 
held a contribution to Elizabethan letters is a portion of 
George Sandys's translation of Ovid, said to have been made 
during his sojourn in Virginia between 1621 and 1624. In 
general, the settlers of Virginia were of the adventurous type 
which expresses itself far more in action than in words ; while 
the settlers of New England were too much devoted to the 
affairs of another world than this to have time, even if they 
had had taste or principle, for devotion to any form of fine 
art. Of Elizabethan times, all the while, as of any period 
in history, it remains true that in a deep sense the men of a 
single generation cannot help being brethren. For all their 
mutual detestation, Puritans and playwrights alike possessed 
the spontaneity of temper, the enthusiasm of purpose, and the 
versatility of power which marked Elizabethan England. 

Broadly speaking, all our northern colonies developed from 
those planted in Massachusetts, and all our southern from that 
planted in Virginia. Questionable though this statement 
may seem to those who consider merely or chiefly the legal 
and political aspects of history, it is socially true to an ex- 



28 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

traordinary degree. The type of character which planted 
itself first on the shores of Massachusetts Bay displayed from 
the beginning a marked power of assimilating whatever came 
within its influence. This trait, akin to that which centuries 
before had made the conquered English slowly but surely as- 
similate their Norman conquerors, the Yankees of our own day 
have not quite lost. An equal power of assimilation marked 
the less austere type of character which first planted itself on 
the James River. Vague and commonplace as this statement 
may seem, it is really important. In modern America no fact 
Is more noteworthy than that, for all the floods of immigra- 
tion which have seemed to threaten almost every political 
and social landmark, our native type still absorbs the foreign. 
The children of immigrants insensibly become natives. The 
irresistible power of a common language and of the common 
ideals which underlie it still dominates. This tendency de- 
clared itself almost from the moments when Jamestown and 
Plymouth were settled. North and South alike, then, may 
broadly be regarded as regions finally settled by native Eliza- 
bethan Englishmen, whose ardent traits proved strong enough 
to impress themselves on posterity and to resist the immigrant 
influences of other traditions than their own. 

Were our study of American history general, it would be 
our business to consider the southern and central colonies 
quite as much as those of New England ; but in literary 
history New England is so predominant that, at least for the 
moment, we may neglect the other portions of the country. 
Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were both settled by devout 
Calvinists, slightly different perhaps in some matter of religious 
discipline, certainly different at first in their theoretical relation 
to the ancestral Church of England, but still so much aUke 
that it is hardly by misuse of language that both are now gen- 
erally called Puritan. Both colonies were governed from the 
beginning by written charters, things which, except for Crom- 
well's Instrument of Government, remain foreign to the politi- 



AMERICAN HISTORY 29 

cal experience of native Englishmen, and which, on the other 
hand, are pretty clearly the prototypes of those written consti- 
tutions under which the United States have grown and pros- 
pered. In both colonies, too, the ideals of dominant Puritanism 
prevailed from the beginning, more than half a generation be- 
fore Cromwell dominated English history. In England, domi- 
nant Puritanism was transitory, — breaking into the course of 
English constitutional history amid the convulsion of the Civil 
Wars, and fatally unable to maintain itself among the complexi- 
ties and traditions which compose the historical continuity of 
the old world. In New England, on the other hand, there 
was no historical continuity, no tradition, no political and 
social complexity, to check its growth. In England the Civil 
Wars came ; then the Commonwealth ; then the Restoration. 
In the history of New England we can find no epoch-making 
facts to correspond with these. There was change of sover- 
eignty, of course; there were heart-burnings and doubts and 
fears enough, and to spare ; but there was no irruption of 
political ideals strange to the founders of our American Com- 
monwealth, nor was there any essential change of dominant 
ideals until the seventeenth century was over. What might 
have happened except for the Revolution of 1688, no one can 
say J but that revolution substantially confirmed the traditions 
of the New England fathers. 

Throughout the seventeenth century meanwhile a fact had 
been developing itself on the American continent which was 
perhaps more significant to the future of New England than 
any in the history of the mother country. Before 16 10 the 
French had finally established themselves in the regions now 
known as Nova Scotia, and from that time forth the French 
power was steadily extending itself to the northward and 
westward of the English colonies. The woi;ks of Francis 
Parkman, in which the history of the French power in 
America is finally dealt with, have sometimes been deemed 
little more than records of picturesque adventure and border 



30 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

warfare, hardly deserving the lifelong devotion of our most 
povi^erful historian. In point of fact, hovi^ever, the matters 
w^hich they so vividly record are perhaps the most decisive 
u^hich have yet occurred on the American continent. The 
French domination of Canada and of the West meant the 
planting and the growth there of a language, with all the 
moral and political ideals which language so fatally involves, 
utterly foreign to those English ideals which have finally come 
to characterise our people. It is hard to generalise rationally ; 
but perhaps we may suggestively say that in a single word 
the ideal for which the French power stood in religion and 
in politics alike was the ideal of authority, — of a centralised 
earthly power which, so far as it reached, should absolutely 
control human thought and conduct. 

Divine authority, of course. New England always recog- 
nised ; but this it found expressed not in a traditionally 
established hierarchy, but in the written words of an inspired 
Bible which all men might read for themselves. Temporal 
authority, too. New England recognised; but temporal author- 
ity secured and limited by written charters, nor yet so absolute 
that for a moment it could be suffered unopposed to violate 
the traditional liberties of England. In a way, then, the con- 
flict between France and England in the New World, a con- 
flict which came to fierce fighting only in the very last years 
of the seventeenth century, was really a conflict between the 
Civil and Canon Law and the Law of England, between 
vestiges of the antique empire of Rome and the beginnings 
of that newer empire of the English language which chiefly 
among modern systems now seems to promise something like 
Roman extension and permanence. It was not until well 
into the eighteenth century, however, that France and Eng- 
land, imperial Rome and the Common Law, came to their 
death-grapple in America. In the seventeenth century, or at 
least until the last ten years of it, there was little more war- 
fare in New England than was caused by the inevitable 



AMERICAN HISTORY 31 

struggles of the native Indians to maintain their existence in 
the presence of the invading race which has long ago swept 
them away. 

The history of seventeenth-century New England, in brief, 
is that of a dominant Puritanism, twenty years older than 
Cromwell's and surviving his by forty years more. Amid 
the expanding life of a still unexplored continent, Puritanism 
was disturbed by no such environment as impeded it in Eng- 
land and fatally checked it so soon. Rather, the only external 
fact which affected New England Puritanism at all, was one 
which strengthened it, — the threatening growth near by of 
a system as foreign to every phase of English thought as it 
was to Puritanism itself. 

From this state of affairs resulted a general state of social 
character which may best be understood by comparing the 
historical records of New England during the hundred years 
now in question. The earliest history of Plymouth is that of 
Governor Bradford, sometimes so blunderingly called the " Log 
of the ' Mayflower; ' " and the earliest history of Massachu- 
setts is that of Governor Winthrop. Winthrop, born in 1588, 
died in 1649; ^'^^ Bradford, born in 1590, died in 1657. 
Both were born under Queen Elizabeth ; both emigrated be- 
fore English Puritanism was dominant ; and neither survived 
to see the Restoration. The state of life and feeling which 
they record, then, must clearly belong to the first period of the 
seventeenth century, — the period when mature men were still 
of Elizabethan birth. In 1652, three years after Winthrop 
died and five years before the death of Bradford, Samuel Sewall 
was born in England. In 1661, four years after Bradford's 
death, he was brought to Massachusetts, where he lived all 
his life, becoming Chief Justice of the Superior Court. From 
1674 to 1729 he kept a diary, which has been published by the 
Massachusetts Historical Society. He died in 1730. Sewall's 
life, then, mostly passed in Massachusetts, was contemporary 
with the English literature between Walton's "Complete 



32 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Angler" and Pope's "Dunciad." Both Winthrop and Brad- 
ford, on the other hand, were born before Shakspere was 
certainly known as a popular playwright. Yet a hasty com- 
parison of Bradford's writing or Winthrop's with Sewall's will 
show so many more points of resemblance than of difference, 
both in actual circumstance and in general mood, that it is 
hard to realise how when Sewall began his memoranda — not 
to speak of when he finished them — the generation to which 
Winthrop and Bradford belonged was almost extinct. The 
three books impress one as virtually contemporary. 

How different this social pause was from the social progress 
of seventeenth-century England may be felt by similarly com- 
paring two familiar English records of the period. Lord 
Herbert of Cherbury, born in 1582 and dead in 1648, was 
almost exactly contemporary with Winthrop; his autobi- 
ography, written in his last years, is among the most charac- 
teristic records of social temper in our language. Fifteen 
years before Lord Herbert's death, and ten before he began 
his autobiography, Samuel Pepys was born, whose celebrated 
diary runs from 1660 to 1669. Pepys stopped writing five 
years before Sewall began, and so far as age goes he might 
personally have known Lord Herbert. Yet the whole temper 
of Herbert is so remote from that of Pepys as to make their 
writing seem of distinctly different epochs ; the fact that their 
lives overlapped seems half incredible. 

Almost any similar comparison you choose will tell the 
same story. Compare, for example, your impressions of Es- 
sex and of Ralegh with those of Monk and of Marlborough ; 
compare Bacon with Newton, and Elizabeth with William 
HL Then hastily name to yourself some of the worthies 
who are remembered from seventeenth-century America. 
Bradford and Winthrop, we have named already ; Winslow 
and Dudley, too. Add to them Standish, Endicott, Roger 
Williams, and John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians; John 
Cotton and Richard Mather ; Increase Mather, son of the 



AMERICAN HISTORY 33 

ane and son-in-law of the other; Cotton Mather, who com- 
bined the blood of the two immigrant ministers ; Sir William 
Phips; and Sewall, who with Stoughton and the rest sat in 
judgment on Salem witchcraft. You can hardly help admitting 
that, though the type of character in America could not re- 
main quite stationary, the change there between the earlier 
years of the seventeenth century and its close was surpris- 
ingly less marked than was the change in England. A little 
thought will speedily show what this means. Although the 
type of character which planted itself in New England during 
the first quarter of the seventeenth century was very Puritan 
and therefore, from the point of view of its contemporary 
English literature, very eccentric, it was truly an Elizabethan 
type. One conclusion seems clear : the native Yankees of 
1700 were incalculably nearer their Elizabethan ancestors than 
were any of their contemporaries born In the mother country. 
In this fact, — a fact rarely emphasised, but once perceived 
hardly to be denied, — v/e come to a consideration worth pon- 
dering. Such historical convulsions as those which declared 
themselves in the England of the seventeenth century result 
from the struggling complexity of social and political forces 
in densely populated regions. Such stagnation of social evo- 
lution as marks the seventeenth century in New England is 
humanly possible only under conditions where the pressure of 
external fact, social, political, and economic, is relaxed, — under 
conditions, in short, where the individual type is for a while 
stronger than environment. Such changes as the course of 
history brought to seventeenth-century England, which it 
found in the full vigour of Elizabethan life and left under the 
constitutional sway of King William III., are changes which 
must result to individuals just as much as to nations them- 
selves in something which, for want of a more exact word, 
we may call experience. Such lack of change as marks the 
America of the seventeenth century indicates the absence of 
this. Yet even in the America of the seventeenth century 

3 



34 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

a true nation, the nation of which we modern Americans 
are ourselves a part, was growing towards a maturity which 
in our time is beginning to reveal itself. Though the phrase 
seem paradoxical, it is surely true that our national life in its 
beginnings was something hardly paralleled in other history,— 
a century of untrammelled national inexperience. 



IV 

LITERATURE IN AMERICA FROM 160O TO 1 7OO 

An instructive impression of the character of literature in 
America during the seventeenth century may be derived from 
a glance at the titles recorded in Mr. Whitcomb's " Chrono- 
logical Outlines." 1 Speaking roughly, — and in considerations 
like this minute precision is of little importance, — we may say 
that out of about two hundred and fifteen of these titles one 
hundred and ten deal with matters which may unquestionably 
be described as religious, and that of these all but one name 
books produced in New England. The next most consider- 
able class of writings includes matters which maybe called his- 
torical or biographical, beginning with " The True Relation " 
of Captain John Smith, — a work hardly to be included in any 
classification of American literature which should not equally 
include M. de Tocqueville's study of our democracy and Mr. 
Bryce's of our contemporary commonwealth ; this list also in- 
cludes such biographies as those of Cotton Mather, whose main 
purpose was quite as religious as it was biographical. Out of 
fifty-five titles thus comprehensively grouped, thirty-seven are 
of New England origin ; the other eighteen, including the sepa- 
rate works of Captain John Smith, come either from Virginia or 

1 Throughout our consideration of literature in America, Whitcomb's 
"Chronological Outlines of American Literature," also published by Mac- 
millan, will prove as generally useful as we shall find Ryland's " Outlines " 
concerning English literature. For the history of literature in America 
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Professor M. C. Tyler's 
books, published by Putnam of New York, are indispensable. The extracts 
from the writers of these centuries in Stedman and Hutchinson's " Library 
of American Literature " are adequate for all general purposes. 



36 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

from the middle colonies. Twenty of Mr. Whitcomb's titles, 
including such things as "The Freeman's Oath," of 1639, 
said to have been the first product of the press in the United 
States, may be called political ; only three of these twenty are 
not from New England. Of nineteen other titles, including 
almanacs and works of scientific character, which may best 
be classified with miscellanies, all but two originated in this 
same region. Finally there are nine titles to which the name 
of literature may properly be applied, if under the head of 
literature one include not only the poems of that tenth Muse, 
Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, but the " Bay Psalm Book," and so 
pervasively theological a poem as Michael Wigglesworth's 
" Day of Doom," and the first version of the " New England 
Primer." Of the nine books thus recorded only Sandys's 
translation of Ovid did not proceed directly from New 
England. 

Though the precise numbers of this hasty count may be 
inexact, and the classification itself questionable, the main 
facts which the classification shows can hardly be denied. 
In the first place, the intellectual activity of New England 
so far exceeded that of any other part of the country 
that in literary history other regions may be neglected. 
In the second place, the intellectual activity of New 
England expressed itself chiefly in a religious form ; and 
next in a form which, if the term " history " include diaries 
and the like, may broadly be described as historical. Out of 
two hundred and fifteen titles all but forty-eight fall under 
one or the other of these heads ; and of these remaining 
forty-eight only nine may by any stretch of classification be 
held pure literature. Meanwhile more than half of Whit- 
comb's titles are incontestably religious in character; and at 
least the New England publications which we have hastily 
classified under the heads of history, politics, miscellany, and 
even literature itself, are considerably impregnated with re- 
ligious material. 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA 37 

Contrasting this impression with our hasty summary of 
English literature during this seventeenth century, — the cen- 
tury in which England added to literature the names of 
Shakspere, of Milton, and of Dryden, — it seems at first as 
if America produced no literature at all. Glancing at our 
English summary a shade more carefully, however, we may 
observe a brief mention that in Elizabethan England along 
with supreme poetry there was also both lasting prose, like 
that of Hooker, of Bacon, and of Ralegh, and such minor 
prose records and annals as are typified by Hakluyt's " Voy- 
ages," together with a good deal of now forgotten religious 
writing. In English literature, these last sorts of writing 
are unimportant ; they were generally produced not by men 
of letters, but either by men of action or by earnest, unin- 
spired men of God. Now, the men who founded the 
colonies of Virginia and of New England were on the one 
hand men of action, and on the other, men of God. It is 
precisely such matter as their Elizabethan prototypes left in 
books now remembered only as material for history that the 
fathers of America produced throughout the first century of 
our national inexperience. 

If we seek in New England for traces of pure literature 
during the seventeenth century, indeed, we shall find our 
attention sadly or humorously attracted by such work as the 
" Bay Psalm Book," produced under the supervision of 
Richard Mather, Thomas Welde, and John Eliot, in 1640, 
the year which in England saw the publication of Carew's 
" Poems," and of Izaak Walton's " Life of Donne." An 
extract from the preface and from the Nineteenth Psalm will 
give a sufficient taste of its quality: — 

" If therefore the verses are not alwayes so smooth and elegant as 
some may desire or expect; let them consider that God's Altar needs 
not our pollishings : Ex. 20. for wee have respected rather a plaine 
translation, then to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any 
paraphrase, and soe have attended Conscience rather then Elegance, 



38 , THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

fidelity rather than poetry, in translating the hebrew words into eng. 
lish language, and Davids poetry into english meetre ; that soe we 
may sing in Sion the Lords songs of prayse according to his owne 
will; untill hee take us from hence, and wipe away all our teares, & 
bid us enter into our masters ioye to sing eternall Halleluiahs." 
• ■•••••• 

"PSALME XIX 
To the chief e Musician a psalme of David 

The heavens doe declare 

the majesty of God : 
also the firmament shews forth 

his handy- work abroad. 

2 Day speaks to day, knowledge 

night hath to night declar'd. 

3 There neither speach nor language is, 

where their voyce is not heard. 

4 Through all the earth their line 

is gone forth, & unto 
the utmost end of all the world, 

their speaches reach aIso : 
A Tabernacle hee 

in them pitcht for the Sun. 

5 Who Bridegroom like from 's chamber goes 

glad Giants-race to run. 

6 From heavens utmost end, 

his course and compassing ; 
to ends of it, & from the heat 
thereof is hid nothing." 

The King James version of the same psalm, finally phrased not 
quite thirty years before, was perfectly familiar to the men vi^ho 
hammered out this barbarous imitation of a metre similarly 
used by Henry VIII.'s Earl of Surrey. This fact should give 
sufficient impression of the literary spirit which controlled the 
Puritan fathers. 

Twenty-two years later, in 1662, — the year when Fuller's 
" Worthies " was published, the year after Davenant's final 
version of " The Siege of Rhodes," and the year before the 
first part of Butler's " Hudibras," Cowley's *' Cutter of 
Colman Street," and Dryden's "Wild Gallant," — Michael 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA 



39 



Wigglesworth, then minister of Maiden, published his "Day 
of Doom, or, A Poetical Description of the Great and Last 
Judgment," which retained its popularity in New England 
for about a century. Of this the " Plea of the Infants," still 
faintly remembered, is example enough : — 



Reprobate In- 
fants plead 
for them- 
selves. 

Rev. 20. 12, 15, 
compared 
with Rom. 5. 
12. 14, & 9. II, 
13- 
Ezek. 18. 3. 



" Then to the Bar, all they drew near 

Who dy'd in infancy, 
And never had or good or bad 

effected pers'nally. 
But from the womb unto the tomb 

were straightway carried, 
(Or at the least e'er they transgrest) 

who thus began to plead : 

" If for our own transgression, 

or disobedience. 
We here did stand at thy left hand 

just were the Recompence : 
But Adam's guilt our souls hath spilt, 

his fault is charg'd on us : 
And that alone hath overthrown, 

and utterly undone us. 

" Not we, but he ate of the Tree, 

whose fruit was interdicted : 
Yet on us all of his sad Fall, 

the punishment's inflicted. 
How could we sin that had not been 

or how is his sin our 
Without consent which to prevent, 

we never had a pow'r .? " 

The plea extends to several stanzas more ; then the 
Lord takes up the argument at great length, concluding as 
follows : — 



" Am I alone of what 's my own, 

no Master or no Lord ? 
Or if I am, how can you claim 

what I to some afford ? 
Will you demand Grace at my hand, 

and challenge what is mine ? 
Will you teach me whom to set free, 

and thus my grace confine ? 



Mat ao. 15. 



40 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Ps'- s8- 3- •' You sinners are, and such a share 

Rom. 6. 23. 

Gal. 3. la as Sinners may expect, 

&°T.' ^ ^^' '"' S"^^ y°" ^hall have ; for I do save 

Rev. 21. 27. none but my own Elect. 

Mat II.' 2^. ' Yet to compare your sin with their 

The wicked ^ho h'ved a longer time, 

all convinced _ . , ^ . ' 

and put to si- 1 do coniess yours is much less, 

Rom.' 3. 10 though every sin 's a crime. 

Mat. 22. 12, 

Sdlbi'e^ " A Crime it is, therefore in bliss 

state of all you may not hope to dwell; 

as^they^stand But unto you I shall allow 

hopeless and the easiest room in Hell. 

helpless be- _., , . ^^. , 

fore an im- The glorious King thus answering, 

expecling'^^"' t^cy cease and plead no longer : 

their final Their Consciences must needs confess 

sentence. , . ^i i. 11 

Rev. 6. 16, 17. his reasons are the stronger. 

Such work as this is more characteristic of seventeenth- 
century America than the sporadic, avowedly literary verse 
of Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, daughter of the elder Governor 
Dudley, whom Professor Tyler calls the first professional 
poet of New England. She died in 1672, — the year when 
Addison was born, and the year which gave to English litera- 
ture, among other things, Dryden's " Conquest of Grenada " 
and " Marriage a la Mode," with his " Preface of Heroic 
Plays," Sir William Temple's " Observations on the Nether- 
lands," and William Wycherly's " Love in a Wood." A 
few verses from her posthumous volume published in 1678, — 
the year which gave us the " Pilgrim's Progress," the third 
part of " Hudibras," Dryden's "All for Love," Lee's "Mithri- 
dates," and South's " Sermons," — will show her at her best: — 

" I heard the merry grasshopper then sing, 
The black-clad cricket bear a second part. 

They kept one tune, and played on the same string, 
Seeming to glory in their little art. 

Shall creatures abject thus their voices raise? 

And in their kind resound their Maker's praise: 

Whilst I, as mute, can warble forth no higher lays. 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA 41 

"When I behold the heavens as in their prime, 

And then the earth (though old) still clad in green, 

The stones and trees, insensible of time. 

Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen ; 

If winter come, and greenness then do fade, 

A Spring returns, and they more youthful made ; 

But man grows old, lies down, remains where once he 's laid. 

" By birth more noble than those creatures all. 

Yet seems by nature and by custom curs'd, 
No sooner born, but grief and care makes fall 

That state obliterate he had at first ; 
Nor youth, nor strength, nor wisdom spring again, 
Nor habitations long their name retain, 
But in oblivion to the final day remain. 

" O Time, the fatal wrack of mortal things, 

That draws oblivion's curtains over kings. 
Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not, 

Their names without a record are forgot, 
Their parts, their ports, their pomp 's all laid in th' dust, 
Nor wit nor gold, nor buildings 'scape time's rust ; 
But he whose name is grav'd in the white stone 
Shall last and shine when all of these are gone." 

Mrs. Bradstreet's family, as the career of her brother, Gov- 
ernor Joseph Dudley, indicates, kept in closer touch with 
England than was common in America ; and besides she was 
clearly a person of what would nowadays be called culture. 
Partly for these reasons her work seems neither individual nor 
indigenous. In seventeenth-century New England, indeed, 
she stands alone, without forerunners or followers; and if 
you compare her poetry with that of the old country, you will 
find it very like such then antiquated work as the " Nosce 
Teipsum" of Sir John Davies, published in 1599, the year 
which gave us the final version of " Romeo and Juliet." In 
its own day, there seems little doubt, the little pure literature 
of seventeenth-century New England was already archaic. 

Apart from this. New England produced only annals, 
records, and far more characteristically writings of the class 



42 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

which may be grouped broadly under theology. Just as our 
glance at the history of seventeenth-century America revealed 
no central convulsion like the Commonwealth, dividing an old 
epoch from a new, so our glance at the American publications 
of this century reveals no central figure Uke Milton's standing 
between the old Elizabethan world which clustered about 
Shakspere, and the new, almost modern, school of letters 
which gathered about Dryden. 

A fact perhaps more characteristic of seventeenth-century 
America than any publication was the foundation in 1636 of 
Harvard College, intended to preserve for posterity that learned 
ministry which was the distinguishing glory of the immigrant 
Puritans. From the very beginning, the history of Harvard 
reveals the liberalism which still distinguishes the college. 
Intended as a conservative force, its general tendency has con- 
stantly proved radical. One can see why. The English tra- 
ditions of the ministers who founded it had been passionately 
Protestant ; but, once secure in their New England isolation, 
these Puritans would have erected a dominant priesthood. Their 
purpose is nowhere better stated than in that passage of Cotton 
Mather's " Magnalia " which records the first political efforts of 
his grandfather Cotton, the first minister of the First Church of 
Boston. On his arrival, " he found the whole country in a 
perplexed & a divided state, as to their civil constitution ; " and 
being requested to suggest convenient laws " from the laws 
wherewith God governed his ancient people," he recom- 
mended among other things " that none should be electors^ 
nor elected^ . . . except such as were visible subjects of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, personally confederated in our churches. 
In these & many other ways, he propounded unto them an 
endeavor after a theocracy^ as near as might be, to that which 
was the glory of Israel." Now the essence of theocratic 
authority, which in simple English means the rule of God 
himself, is that it is absolute; and nothing is more fatally 
foreign to Protestantism than the conception of a government 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA 43 

which should needlessly limit individual liberty. Harvard has 
always been Protestant to the core. Dunster, the first presi- 
dent, lost his seat because he could not conscientiously free 
himself from Baptist heresy ; to-day the unsectarian religion 
of the college combines with its elective system to prove 
Harvard for two centuries and a half faithful to the Protestant 
traditions of its Puritan founders. 

In the history of Harvard College during the seventeenth cen- 
tury the most conspicuous individuals were probably President 
Increase Mather and his son Cotton, both of whom wasted 
some of the best energies of their passionately active lives in 
an effort to make our ancestral seat of learning rather a treas- 
ury of priestly tradition than a seminary of Protestant enthusi- 
asm. The younger of these was a very prolific writer. His 
first publication was apparently a sermon which saw the light 
in 1686; before he died, on the 13th of February, 1728, he 
had published more than four hundred separate titles. In these 
forty- two years of literary activity, however, he never changed 
either his style or his temper; his work falls chiefly though 
not wholly under the two heads of religion and history, which 
with him were so far from distinct that it is often hard to say 
under which a given work or passage should be grouped. 
These heads are the same which we have seen to include 
most American writings of the seventeenth century. Cotton 
Mather's work, in short, may be taken as typical of all the 
American publications of his time. A little study of this 
prolific and representative writer will serve as well as more 
extended observation to define for us what seventeenth- 
century writing in America really was. 



COTTON MATHER 

Cotton Mather, born In Boston on the 12th of February, 
1663, was the son of Increase Mather, a minister already 
eminent, and the grandson of John Cotton and of Richard 
Mather, two highly distinguished ministers of the immigra- 
tion. In 1678 he took his degree at Harvard College. Only 
three years later, in 1 681, he became associated with his father 
as minister of the Second Church in Boston, where he preached 
all his life. 

To understand both his personal history and his literary 
work, we must never forget that the Puritan fathers had 
believed New England charged with a divine mission to show 
the world what human society might be when governed by 
constant devotion to the revealed law of God. This is 
nowhere better stated than by Cotton Mather himself in the 
general introduction to his " Magnalia" : — 

" In short, the First Age was the Golden Age : To return unto T^af, 
will make a Man a Protestant, and I may add, a Puritati. 'T is 
possible, that our Lord Jesus Christ carried some Thousands of 
Reformers into the Retirement of an American Desart, on purpose, 
that with an opportunity granted unto many of his Faithful Servants, 
to enjoy the precious Liberty of their Ministry, tho' in the midst of 
many Temptations all their days. He might there To them first, and 
then By them, give a Specimen of many good Things, which he would 
have His Churches elsewhere aspire and arise unto : And This being 
done, He knows not^ whether there be Xiat All Done, that New Eng- 
land wzs planted for; and whether the Plantation may not, soon aftei 
this, Co^ne to Nothing.^'' 

1 Mather's rare Errata bid us " blot out not." 



COTTON MATHER 45 

Whatever the political disturbances of Massachusetts under 
the original charter, the period between the foundation of the 
colony and the revocation of this charter was on the whole one 
of theocracy. Toward the end of this period Cotton Mather 
entered upon his ministry and the extreme activity of his life. 
At that very moment the charter was m danger ; four years later 
it was revoked. To advocates of the old order the ensuing 
troubles seemed the most critical which New England had ever 
known. In few words the question was whether under some 
new government the old domination of the ministry should per- 
sist or whether the ministry must relinquish temporal power. 
Increase Mather hastened to England, where he hoped he 
might do something toward securing a restoration of the 
charter. Cotton Mather, still almost a boy, was left virtually 
at the head of the conservative party in Boston, devoting him- 
self with untiring enthusiasm both in public acts and in private 
devotions to the maintenance in New England of the ancestral 
policy of theocracy. In 1692 came news that King William 
had granted a new charter which secured to Massachusetts a 
government as free as any in the civilised world, and that the 
first royal governor appointed thereunder was Sir William Phips, 
a devout, old-fashioned New England Calvinist, and a member 
of the very church over which the Mathers presided. 

Cotton Mather believed that this triumphant answer to his 
prayers demanded on his part some peculiar act for the ser- 
vice of God. He looked about to see what service God most 
needed, and discovered thickening in the air about him a 
storm of occultism. Nowadays we call such things spirit- 
ualism, or hypnotism ; in the seventeenth century they were 
called witchcraft, and were believed to be literally the work 
of the Devil himself. Beyond doubt Cotton Mather was 
among the chief leaders of the attack on this mysterious evil 
which ended in the memorable tragedy at Salem ; but pos- 
terity, which will never forget that the witches were hanged, 
has long forgotten the legal point on which their hanging 



46 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ' 

turned. No one dreamt of denying the devilish fact of 
witchcraft, — acknowledged by the law of the period as a 
capital crime. The only doubt was how it might legally be 
proved. A question arose whether what was called spectral 
evidence should be accepted j that is, whether the testimony 
of bewitched persons, concerning what they saw and felt in 
the paroxysms of their possessions, was valid against the ac- 
cused. Cotton Mather's personal records declare that he 
warned the court against the dangers of spectral evidence in 
cases of life and death ; but that when against his protest the 
court decided to accept it, he felt bound, believing witch- 
craft diabolical, not publicly to oppose the decision. It was 
mostly on spectral evidence that the witches were hanged ; 
when spectral evidence was rejected, the prosecutions soon 
came to an end. Then arose that deep revulsion of feeling 
which posterity has so bitterly cherished. For two hundred 
years, there has been little mercy shown the theocratic minis- 
ters who devotedly urged on the prosecution of the witches ; 
and, whatever his actual responsibility. Cotton Mather, the 
least forgotten of these ministers, has borne the brunt of all 
the evil which tradition has fixed on the period. 

The collapse of the witch trials in 1692 may be said to 
mark the end of theocracy in New England, Nine years 
later, in 1701, the orthodox party in the church had another 
blow. Increase Mather, after sixteen years' incumbency as 
President of Harvard College, was finally removed to be re- 
placed by a divine of more liberal tendencies. This really 
ended the public career of both father and son. In the 
public life of New England, as in that of the mother coun- 
try, we may say, the ideal of the Common Law finally 
supplanted the biblical ideal of the Puritans, and at the 
oldest of New England seminaries the ideal of Protestantism 
finally vanquished that of priesthood. 

Cotton Mather lived on until 1728, preaching, writing 
numberless books, and doing much good scientific work; 



COTTON MATHER 47. 

among other things, he was the first person in the English- 
speaking world to practise inoculation for small-pox. Un- 
tiringly busy, hoping against hope for well on to thirty years, 
he died at last with the word Fructuosus on his lips as a last 
counsel to his son. Undoubtedly he was eccentric and fan- 
tastic, so reactionary in temper that those who love progress 
have been apt to think him almost as bad as he was queer. 
For all his eccentricity, however, and perhaps on account of 
the exaggeration of his traits in general, he seems on the whole 
the most complete type of the oldest-fashioned divine of New 
England. He was born in Boston, and educated at Harvard 
College ; he lived in Boston all his life, never straying a hun- 
dred miles away. Every external influence brought to bear 
on him was local. Whatever else his life and work means, 
then, it cannot help expressing what human existence taught 
the most intellectually active of seventeenth-century Yankees. 

Here, of course, we are concerned with him only as a man of 
letters. His literary activity was prodigious. Sibley's " Har- 
vard Graduates " records some four hundred titles of his act- 
ual publications ; besides this, he wrote an unpublished treatise 
on medicine which would fill a folio volume ; and his un- 
published " Biblia Americana" — ^n exhaustive commentary 
on the whole Bible — would fill two or three folios more. He 
left behind him, too, many sermons, not to speak of letters 
and of diaries, which have never seen print. Until one actu- 
ally inspects the documents, it seems incredible that in forty- 
five years any single human being could have penned so many 
words as we thus see to have come from the hand of one of 
the busiest ministers, one of the most insatiable scholars and 
readers, and one of the most active politicians whom America 
has ever known. 

To discuss in detail such a mass of work is out of the 
question ; but, though many of Cotton Mather's writings 
were published after 1700, his most celebrated and consid- 
erable book, the "Magnalia," which was made toward the 



48 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

middle of his life and which includes reprints of a number 
of brief works published earlier, typifies all he did as a man 
of letters, before or afterwards. It was begun, his diary tells 
us, in 1693; and although not published until 1702, it was 
virtually finished in 1697. These dates throw light on what 
the book really means ; they come just between the end of 
those witchcraft trials which broke the political power of the 
clergy, and the final defeat of the Mathers in their endeavour 
to retain the government of Harvard College. Though Har- 
vard tradition still holds this endeavour to have been chiefly a 
matter of personal ambition, whoever comes intimately to 
know the Mathers must feel that to them the question seemed 
far otherwise. What both had at heart was a passionate 
desire, based on fervent, unshaken faith, that New England 
should remain true to the cause of the fathers, which both 
believed indubitably the cause of God. In the years when the 
" Magnalia " was writing, there seemed a chance that if con- 
temporary New England could awaken to a sense of what 
pristine New England had been, all might still go well. 
Despite the fact that the " Magnalia " is professedly a history, 
then, it may better be regarded as a passionate controversial 
work. Its true motive was to excite so enthusiastic a sym- 
pathy with the ideals of the Puritan fathers that, whatever fate 
might befall the civil government, their ancestral seminary of 
learning should remain true to its colours. 

At the time when the " Magnalia " was conceived, the 
New England colonies were about seventy years old. Broadly 
spea|cing, there had flourished in them three generations, — the 
immigrants, their children, and their grandchildren. The 
time was come, Cotton Mather thought, when the history 
of these three generations might be critically examined ; if 
this examination should result in showing that there had 
lived in New England an unprecedented proportion of men 
and women and children whose earthly existence had given 
signs that they were among the elect, then his book might go 



COTTON MATHER 49 

far to prove that the pristine policy of New England had been 
especially favoured of the Lord. For surely the Lord would 
choose His elect most eagerly in places where life was con- 
ducted most according to His will. 

Li this mood the " Magnalia " was written. Its first sen- 
tence sounds the key-note of the whole : — 

" I write the Wonders of the Christian Religion, flying from the 
Depravations of Europe, to the American Strand: And, assisted by 
the Holy Author of that Religion, I do, with all Conscience of Truth, 
required therein by Him, who is the Truth it self, report the Wottder- 
ful Displays of His Infinite Power, Wisdom, Goodness, and Faithful- 
ness, wherewith His Divine Providence hath Irradiated an Indian 
Wilderness.'''' 

So it proceeds through its hundreds of pages, dwelling most 
on those traits of New England which Cotton Mather be- 
lieved especially to indicate the favour of God. He tells first 
the story of the colonies, giving little space to what he thinks 
the evil side of it : — 

" Though I cannot approve the conduct of Josephus ; (whom Jerom 
not unjustly nor inaptly calls ' the Greek Livy,') when he had left out of 
his Antiquities, the story of the Golden Calf, and I don't wonder to 
find Chamier, and Rivet, and others, taxing him for his partiality to- 
wards his country-men ; yet I have left unmentioned some censurable 
occurrences in the story of our Colonies, as things no less unuseful 
than improper to be raised out of the grave, wherein Oblivion hath 
now buried them; lest I should have incurred the pasquil bestowed 
upon Pope Urban, who, employing a committee to rip up the old 
errors of his predecessors, one clapped a pair of spurs upon the heels 
of the statue of St. Peter ; and a label from the statue of St. Paul 
opposite thereunto, upon the bridge, asked him, 'Whither he was 
bound ? ' St. Peter answered, ' I apprehend some danger in staying 
here ; I fear they'll call me in question for denying my Master.' And 
St. Paul replied, ' Nay then I had best be gone too, for they question 
me also for persecuting the Christians before my conversion.' " 

Cotton Mather's scale of values, then, considerably differs 
from that of a critical modern historian. In his general nar- 
rative, for example, he hardly mentions the Antinomian con- 



50 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

tnaversy, and has little to say of such subsequently famous 
personages as Roger Williams or Mrs. Anne Hutchinson. On 
the other hand, he details at loving length, first the lives of those 
governors and magistrates who seemed especial servants of the 
Lord, from Bradford and Winthrop and Theophilus Eaton to 
Sir William Phips ; and next the lives and spiritual experiences 
of a great number of the immigrant clergy and of their suc- 
cessors in the pulpit. He recounts the history of Harvard 
College during its first sixty years ; and he lays down with sur- 
prising lucidity the orthodox doctrine and discipline of the 
New England churches. These matters fill five of the seven 
books into which the " Magnalia " is divided. The last 
two books portray the reverse of the picture ; one deals with 
" Remarkable Mercies and Judgments on many particular per- 
sons among the people of New England," and the other with 
" The Wars of the Lord — the Afflictive Disturbances which 
the Churches of New England have suffered from their various 
adversaries ; and the Wonderful Methods and Mercies, where- 
by the Churches have been delivered." Full of petty personal 
anecdote, and frequently revealing not only bigoted prejudice 
but grotesque superstition, these last two books have been 
more generally remembered than the rest. One commonly 
hears the " Magnalia " mentioned in terms which seem to 
assert these least admirable parts of it to be the most charac- 
teristic of work and writer alike. Characteristic they are, but 
little more so than the Clown in " Hamlet "is of Shakspere; 
no one but their author could have written them, yet in 
the whole body of his work they are a minor feature. For 
whoever grows familiar with the " Magnalia " must feel that 
it goes far toward accomplishing the purpose which Cotton 
Mather intended. 

The prose epic of New England Puritanism it has been 
called, setting forth in heroic mood the principles, the history, 
and the personal characters of the fathers. The principles, 
theologic and disciplinary alike, are stated with clearness, dig- 



COTTON MATHER 51 

nity, and fervour. The history, though its less welcome phases 
are often lightly emphasised, and its details are hampered by 
no deep regard for minor accuracy, is set forth with a sincere 
ardour which makes its temper more instructive than that of 
many more trustworthy records. And the life-like portraits 
of the Lord's chosen, though full of quaintly fantastic phrases 
and artless pedantries, are often drawn with touches of enthu- 
siastic beauty. 

A few sentences from his life of the apostle Eliot, whose 
Indian Bible is remembered as the first complete version of 
scripture printed in New England, will typify Mather's fantas- 
tic vein : — 

" I know not what thoughts it will produce in my Reader, when I 
inform him, that once finding that the Daemons in a possessed young 
Woman, understood the Latin and Greek and Hebrew Languages, 
my Curiosity led me to make Trial of this Indian language, and the 
Daemons did seem as if they did not understand it. This tedious 
Language our Eliot (the Anagram of whose name was Toile) quickly 
became a Master of ; he employ'd a pregnant and witty Indian, who 
also spoke English well, for his Assistance in it ; and compiling some 
Discourses by his Help, he would single out a Word, a Noun, a Verb, 
and pursue it through all its variations : Having finished his Gram- 
mar, at the close he writes, Prayers and Pains thro'' Faith in Christ 
Jesus will do any thing / And being by his Prayers and Pains thus 
furnished, he set himself in the year 1646 to preach the Gospel of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, among these Desolate Outcasts." 

The last paragraph of the life of Theophilus Eaton, first 
Governor of New Haven, will show the dignity of Mather's 
best narrative : — 

" Thus continually he, for about a Score of Years, was the Glory 
and Pillar of New-Haven Colony. He would often say. Some count 
it a great matter to Die well, but I am sure His a great iriatter to Live 
well. All our Care should be while we have our Life to use it well, 
and so when Death puts an end u?tto that, // will put an end unto all 
our Cares. But having Excellently managed his Care to Live well, 
God would have him to Die well, without any room or time then 
given to take any Care at all; for he enjoyed a Death sudden to 
everyone but himself ! Having worshipped God with his Family after 



52 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

his usual manner, and upon some Occasion with much Solemnity 
charged all the Family to carry it well unto their Mistress who was 
now confined by Sickness, he Supp'd, and then took a turn or two 
abroad for his Meditations. After that he came in to bid his Wife 
Good-night, before he left her with her Watchers ; which when he 
did, she said, Methinks you look sad! Whereto he reply'd. The Dif- 
ferences risen in the Church of Hartford make me so; she then 
added, Let us e'en go back to our Native Country again; to which 
he answered, You may, (and so she did) but I shall die here. This 
was the last Word that ever she heard him speak ; for now retiring 
unto his Lodging in another Chamber, he was overheard about mid- 
night fetching a Groan; and unto one, sent in presently to enquire 
how he did, he answered the Enquiry with only saying. Very III / 
And without saying any more, he fell asleep in fesus : In the Year 
1657 loosing Anchor frofn New-Haven for the better." 

Finally, the last clause of a ponderous sentence from his 
life of Thomas Shepard, first minister of Cambridge, is far 
more characteristic of Mather than are many of the oddities 
commonly thought of when his name is mentioned : — 

" As he was a very Studious Person, and a very lively Preacher; 
and one who therefore took great Pains in his Preparations for his 
Publick Labours, which Preparations he would usually finish on 
Saturday, by two a Clock in the Afternoon ; with Respect whereunto 
he once used these Words, God will curse that Man's Labours, that 
lumbers up and down in the World all the Week, and then upon 
Saturday, in the afternoon goes to his Study ; whereas God knows, 
that Time were little enough to pray in and weep in, and get his Heart 
into a fit Frame for the Duties of the approaching Sabbath ; So the 
Character of his daily Conversation, was A Trembling Walk with 
God:' 

" A trembling walk with God," — you shall look far for a 
nobler phrase than that, or for one which should more truly 
characterise not only Thomas Shepard, but the better life 
of all the first century of New England. In old New Eng- 
land there were really more such characters as the Puritans 
deemed marked for God's elect than are recorded of almost 
any other society of equal size and duration in human history. 
For this fact we can account in modern terms which would 
have been strangely unwelcome to Cotton Mather and the 



COTTON MATHER 53 

godly personages whose memories he has preserved. In their 
New England, the pressure of external fact was politically 
and socially relaxed ; except with the brute forces of nature 
the struggle for existence was less fierce than in almost 
any other region now remembered. Individuals could there 
progress from cradle to grave with less distortion than must 
always be worked by such social struggles as changed the 
England of Elizabeth through that of Cromwell into that 
of William III., and as have steadily altered and developed the 
course of European history ever since. Relax the pressure 
which a dense society brings upon human life, and the traits 
of human nature which will reveal themselves in a simpler 
world are generally traits which those who love ideals are apt 
to call better. Such relaxation of pressure blessed pristine 
New England ; the results thereof the '' Magnalia " records. 

These it records with an enthusiasm which, in spite of the 
pedantic queerness of Mather's style, one grows to feel more 
and more vital. What is more, amid all his vagaries and 
oddities, one feels too a trait which even our few extracts may 
perhaps indicate. Again and again, Cotton Mather writes 
with a rhythmical beauty which recalls the enthusiastic spon- 
taneity of Elizabethan English, so different from the Eng- 
lish which came after the Civil Wars. And though the 
" Magnalia " hardly reveals the third characteristic of Eliza- 
bethan England, no one can read the facts of Cotton Mather's 
busy, active life without feeling that this man himself, who 
wrote with enthusiastic spontaneity, and who in his earthly 
life was minister, politician, man of science, scholar, and con- 
stant organiser of innumerable good works, embodied just that 
kind of restless versatility which characterised Elizabethan 
England and which even to our own day has remained char- 
acteristic of New England Yankees. 

For if the lapse of seventy years had not left New England 
unchanged, it had altered life there far less than men have 
supposed. The " Magnalia " was published two years after 



54 THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Dryden died ; and even the few extracts at which we have 
been able to glance will show that it groups itself not with 
such work as Dryden's, but rather with such earlier work as 
that of Fuller or even of Burton. As a man of letters, 
Cotton Mather, who died in the reign of George IL, had 
more in common with that generation of his ancestors which 
was born under the last of the Tudors than with any later 
kind of native Englishmen. 



VI 



SUMMARY 



Our hasty glance at the literary history of America during 
the seventeenth century has revealed some facts worth remem- 
bering. In 1630, when Boston was founded, the mature in- 
habitants of America, like their brethren in England, were 
native Elizabethans. In 1700 this race had long been in its 
grave. In densely populated England, meanwhile, historical 
pressure — social, political, and economic alike — had wrought 
such changes in the national character as are marked by the 
contrast between the figures of Elizabeth and of King William 
III. The dominant type of native Englishmen had altered : 
national experience was steadily accumulating. In America 
there had been no such external pressure; and though the 
immigrant Puritans had long been no more, and though isola- 
tion was making the inhabitants of New England more and 
more provincial, they had preserved to an incalculable degree 
the spontaneous, enthusiastic, versatile character of their immi- 
grant ancestors. In literature seventeenth-century England 
had expressed itself in at least three great and distinct moods, 
of which the dominant figures were Shakspere, Milton, and 
Dryden. Though America had meanwhile produced hardly 
any pure letters, it had continued, long after Elizabethan temper 
had faded from the native literature of England, to keep alive 
with little alteration those minor phases of Elizabethan 
thought and feeling which had expressed the temper of the 
ancestral Puritans. In history and in literature alike, the 
story of seventeenth-century America is a story of unique 
national Inexperience. 



BOOK II 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



BOOK II 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

I 

ENGLISH HISTORY FROM I7OO TO 180O 

When the eighteenth century began, the reign of William III. 
was about as near its close as that of Elizabeth was a hun- 
dred years before. In 1702 William was succeeded by 
Queen Anne. In 17 14 George I. followed her, founding 
the dynasty which still holds the throne. George II. suc- 
ceeded him in 1727; and in 1760 came George III., whose 
reign extended till 1 8 20. The names of these sovereigns 
instantly suggest certain familiar facts, of which the chief is 
that during the first half of the century the succession re- 
mained somewhat in doubt. It was only in 1745, when the 
reign of George II. was more than half finished, that the last 
fighting with Stuart pretenders occurred on British soil. On 
British soil, but not on English : there has been no actual 
warfare in England since in 1685 the battle of Sedgmoor sup- 
pressed the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion against James II. 
These obvious facts indicate historical circumstances which 
have had profound effect on English character. 

Continental nations are now and again disposed to call the 
English a nation of shopkeepers ; and certainly during the 
past two centuries the commercial prosperity of England has 
exceeded that of most other countries. An imperative condi- 
tion of such prosperity is peace and domestic order. Good 
business demands an efficient police, and in general a state of 



6o THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

life which permits people to devote themselves to their own 
affairs, trusting politics to those whose office it is to govern. 
Under such circumstances people have small delight in civil 
wars and disputed successions. Many eighteenth-century Eng- 
lishmen, no doubt, who in the perspective of a hundred and fifty 
years look romantically attractive, thought the divine right of 
the Stuarts unquestionable, and the Georges usurpers ; but par- 
liamentary government could give England what divine right 
could no longer give it, — prosperous public order. In the 
course of the eighteenth century, then, there steadily grew a 
body of public opinion, at last overwhelming, which with all 
the tenacity of British unreason maintained the actual state 
of the constitution. The whole force of social and political 
history in England tended slowly but surely to the mainte- 
nance of established institutions. 

During this eighteenth century we accordingly find in Eng- 
land no such radical changes as marked the preceding. Though 
George III. survived William of Orange far longer than 
William had survived Queen Elizabeth, we can feel between 
the Prince of Orange and his native English successor no 
such contrast as we felt between William and the last 
Tudor queen. For all that, the century was not stagnant j 
and perhaps our simplest way of estimating its progress is to 
name four English battles which are still enough remembered 
to be recorded in the brief historical summaries of Ryland's 
"Outlines of English Literature." In 1704 was fought the 
battle of Blenheim; in 1745, that of Fontenoy ; in 1759 
Wolfe fell victorious at Quebec; and in 1798 Nelson won 
the first of his great naval victories — the battle of the Nile. 

Whatever else these battles have in common, all four were 
fought against the French, — the one continental power whose 
coast is in sight of England. Throughout the century, then, 
the English Channel was apt to be an armed frontier; the 
geographical isolation of England was tending toward that 
international isolation which until our own time has been so 



ENGLISH HISTORY 6i 

marked. A second fact about these four battles is almost as 
obvious. However important the questions at issue, people 
nowadays have generally forgotten what Blenheim and Fonte- 
noy were fought about. Of Blenheim, indeed, we remember, 
along with the great name of Marlborough, only the poem by 
Southey, where old Caspar, his work done, tells little Peter- 
kin, who is rolling about the skulls just turned up by the 
ploughshare, how these were the fruits of the famous victory ; 
and when Peterkin inquires what the dead soldiers died for, 
all old Caspar can tell him is that Marlborough was there, 
and Prince Eugene, and that the victory was famous. Southey 
doubtless intended this poem as a protest against war ; it now 
seems rather an unwitting satire on historic tradition. For 
though this tradition has preserved the names of Blenheim and 
of Marlborough and of Eugene, it has quite forgotten why 
Englishmen and Frenchmen were struggling to the death in 
1704. So of Fontenoy : tradition keeps surely alive only a 
doubtful anecdote that when the French and English were 
face to face, some French officer pulled off his hat with a 
polite bow and civilly invited the enemy to fire first. The 
other two battles which we have called to mind, those of 
Quebec and of the Nile, were fought in the second half of 
the century ; and of these tradition still remembers the objects. 
The battle of Quebec finally assured the dominance in America 
of the English Law. The battle of the Nile began to check 
that French revolutionary power which under the transitory 
empire of Napoleon once seemed about to conquer the whole 
civilised world, and which met its final defeat seventeen years 
later at Waterloo. 

The names of Blenheim and the Nile suggest one more 
fact : each of these battles gave England a national hero. 
Marlborough we have already glanced at, — a soldier of the 
closing seventeenth century as well as of the dawning eight- 
eenth, whose career asserted that in the political struggles 
of continental Europe England could never be left out of 



62 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

account. Nelson, whose name is almost as familiarly asso- 
ciated with the battle of the Nile as with his victorious 
death at Trafalgar, stood for even more ; he embodied not 
only that dominion of the sea which since his time England 
has maintained, but also that imperial power — for in his 
time England was already becoming imperial — which was 
able to withstand and to destroy the imperial force of France 
incarnate in Napoleon. Imperial though Nelson's victories 
were, however. Nelson himself was almost typically insular. 
It is hardly a play on words to say that as we compare 
Marlborough, the chief English hero of the opening century, 
with Nelson, the chief English hero of its close, Marl- 
borough seems a European and Nelson an Englishman. 
This fact implies the whole course of English history in 
the eighteenth century. Just as the internal history of 
England tended to a more and more conservative preserva- 
tion of public order, so her international history tended more 
and more to make Englishmen a race apart. 

Before the century was much more than half done, this 
insular English race had on its hands something more than 
the island where its language, its laws, its traditions, and its 
character had been developed ; something more, besides, than 
those American colonies whose history during their first cen- 
tury we have already traced. As the name of Quebec has 
already reminded us, the wars with the French had finally 
resulted in the conquest by the English Law of those Ameri- 
can regions which had threatened to make American history 
that of a ceaseless conflict between English institutions and 
those of continental Europe. The same years which had 
brought about the conquest of Canada had also achieved the 
conquest of that Indian Empire which still makes England 
potent in Asia. In 1760, when George III. came to the 
throne, imperial England, which included the thirteen colonies 
of North America, seemed destined to impose its image on the 
greatest continents of both hemispheres. 



ENGLISH HISTORY 6^^ 

Twenty years later the American Revolution had broken all 
political union between those regions in the old world and in 
the new which have steadily been dominated by English 
Law. That on both sides of the Atlantic the Common Law 
has been able to survive this shock is perhaps the most con^ 
elusive evidence of vitality in its long and varied history. The 
Revolution itself we shall consider more closely later : one fact 
about it we may remark here. Until the Revolution, America, 
like England, had considered France a traditional enemy. 
Open warfare with England naturally brought America and 
France together; without French aid, indeed, our independ- 
ence could hardly have been established. A very few years, 
then, awoke among Americans a general sentiment, which 
their tradition has steadily maintained, of strong nominal sym- 
pathy with the French. At the moment when this declared 
itself, as any one can now see, France, regardless of any such 
impediment to freedom of thought as might lurk in the facts 
of human experience, was vigorously, blindly developing that 
abstract philosophy of human rights which less than twenty 
years later resulted in the tragic convulsions of the French 
Revolution, The fascinating commonplaces of this philoso- 
phy were eagerly welcomed in America, where they have 
been popularly repeated ever since. From that time to this, 
indeed, American talk has been so radical that comparatively 
few appreciate how slightly all these glittering generalities 
have really distorted American conduct from the good old 
principle that true human rights are those which experience 
has proved beneficial. In no way, however, has America 
evinced its English origin more clearly than by the serenity 
with which it has forbidden logic to meddle with the substan- 
*ial maintenance of legal institutions. v 

But our concern now is with England, who found herself, 
v^'hen the French Revolution came, the chief conservative 
power of Europe. The conservatism for which she stood, 
and has stood ever since, is of the kind which defends tradi- 



64 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

tion against the assaults of untested theory. Without ignor- 
ing human rights, it maintains that the most precious human 
rights are those which have proved humanly feasible; ab- 
stract ideals of law and government, however admirable on 
paper, it regards with such suspicion as in daily life practi- 
cal men feel concerning the vagaries of plausible thinkers 
who cannot make both ends meet. The conservatism of 
eighteenth-century England, in short, defended against un- 
tested philosophy the experience embodied in the unwritten 
Common Law ; it defended custom, which at worst had 
proved tolerable, against theory, which had never been put to 
proof. So in this closing struggle of the eighteenth century, 
which continued for half a generation after the century ended, 
external forces combined with internal ones, — with a full 
century of domestic peace, and the final settlement of the 
royal succession, — to develop in England that isolated, de- 
liberate, somewhat slow-witted character which foreigners 
now suppose permanently English. 

The typical Englishman of modern caricature is named John 
Bull. What he looks like is as familiar to any reader of the 
comic papers as is the "austerely sheepish" countenance of 
Stuart's Washington. There is a deep significance, then, in 
the fact that the costume still attributed to John Bull is virtu- 
ally that of the English middle classes in 1800. No date 
better marks the moment when external forces and internal 
had combined to make typical of England the insular, vigor- 
ous, intolerant character embodied in that familiar and portly 
figure. Whatever else John Bull may be, he is not sponta- 
neous in his reactions to fresh impressions ; he is not enthu- 
siastic, except in irascibility ; and he is about as far from 
versatile as any human being who ever trod the earth. 



II 

ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM 17OO TO 180O 

The English literature of the eighteenth century is very 
different from that of the century before. The contrast may 
conveniently be considered by comparing the two periods as 
they began, as they proceeded, and as they closed. The three 
literary periods of the seventeenth century were dominated by 
three great figures, — those of Shakspere, of Milton, and of 
Dryden. While no such eminence as theirs marks the literary 
history of the century with which we are now concerned, 
three typical figures of its different periods may conveniently 
be called to mind, — Addison, Johnson, and Burke. The very 
mention of these names must instantly define the contrast now 
worth our attention. The seventeenth century was one of 
decided literary development, or at least of change. In com- 
parison the eighteenth century was one of marked monotony. 

The literature of its beginning is traditionally associated 
with the name of Queen Anne almost as closely as that of 
a hundred years before is with the name of Queen Elizabeth. 
In 1702, when Anne came to the throne, neither Addison, 
Steele, Swift, Defoe, nor Pope had attained full reputation ; 
in 1 7 14, when she died, all five had done enough to assure 
their permanence, and to fix the type of literature for which 
their names collectively stand. Prose they had brought to 
that deliberate, balanced, far from passionate form which it 
was to retain for several generations •, poetry they had cooled 
into that rational heroic couplet which was to survive in 
America until the last days of Dr. Holmes. They had 
brought into being meanwhile a new form of publication, — 

5 



66 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

the periodical, — destined to indefinite development. From 
the time when the first "Tatler" appeared in 1709 to the 
present day, a considerable part of our lasting literature has 
been published in periodicals ; and periodicals bespeak, before 
all things else, a permanent and increasing literary public. If 
any one name can imply all this, it is surely that of the urbane 
Joseph Addison. 

In the middle of the century, when the reign of George II. 
was two-thirds over, English literature was producing a good 
many works which have survived. Between 1748 and 1752, 
for example, there were published, to go no further, Richard- 
son's " Clarissa Harlowe," Smollett's " Roderick Random " 
and " Peregrine Pickle," Thomson's " Castle of Indolence," 
Fielding's " Tom Jones " and " Amelia," Johnson's " Vanity of 
Human Wishes " and a considerable portion of the " Rambler," 
Gray's " Elegy in a Country Churchyard," and Goldsmith's 
" Life of Nash." Sterne's work and Goldsmith's more 
famous writing came only a little later; and during these 
same five years appeared Wesley's " Plain Account of the 
People Called Methodists," Hume's " Inquiry into the Human 
Understanding," — and his " Inquiry concerning the Principles 
of Morals " and " Political Discourses." Though the works 
of Wesley and of Hume are something else than mere litera- 
ture, they deserve our notice because Wesley's name recalls 
that strenuous outburst against religious formalism which has 
bred the most potent body of modern English Dissenters, and 
Hume's that rational tendency in philosophy which during the 
eighteenth century was far more characteristic of France than 
of England. Putting these aside, we may find in the literary 
record of this mid-century a state of things somewhat differ- 
ent from that which prevailed under Queen Anne. Another 
considerable form of English literature had come into exist- 
ence, — the prose novel, whose germs were already evident in 
the character sketches of the " Spectator," and in the charac- 
terless but vivacious fictions of Defoe. Poetry, preserving 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 67 

studied correctness of form, was beginning to tend back toward 
something more like romantic sentiment ; the prose essay had 
grown heavier and less vital. For the moment the presiding 
genius of English letters was Dr. Johnson, throughout whose 
work we can feel that the formalism which under Queen 
Anne had possessed the grace of freshness was becoming tra- 
ditional. In conventional good sense his writings, like those 
which surrounded them, remained vigorous ; but their vigour 
was very unlike the spontaneous, enthusiastic versatility of 
Elizabethan letters. 

About twenty-five years later comes a date so mertiorable 
to Americans that a glance at its literary record in England 
can hardly help being suggestive. The year from which our 
national independence is officially dated came at the height 
of Burke's powers, and just between Sheridan's " Rivals," 
published the year before, and his " School for Scandal," of 
the year after. In the record of English publications, 1776 
is marked by no important works of pure literature ; but in 
that year Hume died, Jeremy Bentham published his " Frag- 
ment on Government," Gibbon the first volume of his " De- 
cline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Adam Smith his 
*■*■ Wealth of Nations," and Thomas Paine his " Common 
Sense; " the second edition of the " Encyclopedia Britannica," 
too, appeared in ten volumes. In 1776, it seems, things 
literary in England, as well as things political in the British 
Empire, were taking a somewhat serious turn. 

In the last ten years of the century, the years when the 
French Revolution was at its fiercest, there appeared in Eng- 
land works by Burke and by Mrs. RadclifFe, Boswell's " John- 
son," Cowper's " Homer," Paine's " Rights of Man," Rogers's 
" Pleasures of Memory," poems by Burns, two or three books 
by Hannah More, the first poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
Southey, Scott, and Landor, Godwin's " Caleb WilUams," 
Lewis's " Monk," Miss Burney's " Camilla," Roscoe's " Life 
of Lorenzo the Magnificent," and Charles Lamb's " Rosamund 



68 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Gray." A curious contrast this shows to the state of things 
in contemporary France. Though in political matters the 
French had broken away from every tradition, their literature 
had to wait thirty- years more for enfranchisement from the 
tyranny of conventional form. England meanwhile, more 
tenacious of political tradition than ever before, had begun to 
disregard the rigid literary tradition which had been dominant 
since the time of Dryden. Burns, to this day the greatest 
British poet of the people, died in 1796. The " Lyrical Bal- 
lads " of Wordsworth and Coleridge, which may be regarded 
in literature as declaring the independence of the individual 
spirit, appeared in 1798, the year when Nelson fought the 
battle of the Nile. Fiction at the same time seemed less vital. 
In the hands of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett it had 
reached high development. Compared with the masterpieces 
of forty years before, Mrs. RadclifFe's " Mysteries of Udolpho," 
Lewis's " Monk," and in some aspects even Godwin's " Caleb 
Williams," look more like the vagaries of an outworn affec- 
tation than like the heralds of what a {tw years later was to 
prove a great romantic period. In the last decade of the 
eighteenth century, though formal tradition was clearly broken, 
the renewed strength which was to animate English literature 
for the next thirty years was not yet quite evident. At the 
moment, too, no figure in English letters had even such 
predominance as that of Addison in Queen Anne's time, 
far less such as Johnson's had been in the later years of 
George II. Of the elder names mentioned in our last hasty 
list the most memorable seems that of Burke. 

These names of Addison, Johnson, and Burke prove quite 
as significant of English literature in the eighteenth century 
as those of Shakspere, Milton, and Dryden proved of that 
literature a century before. Shakspere, Milton, and Dryden 
seem men of three different epochs ; at least comparatively, 
Addison, Johnson, and Burke seem men of a single type. 
The trait which most distinguishes them from one another. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 69 

indeed, seems that Johnson's temper was rather more serious 
than that of Addison, and Burke's than Johnson's. After all, 
the mere names tell enough. Think of Shakspere and Dryden 
together, and then of Addison and Burke. Think of Milton 
as the figure who intervenes between the first pair, and of 
Johnson similarly intervening between the second. You can 
hardly fail to perceive the trend of English letters. In 1600 
these letters were alive with the spontaneity, the enthusiasm, 
and the versatility of the Elizabethan spirit. By Dryden's 
time this was already extinct ; throughout the century which 
followed him it showed little symptom of revival. The ro- 
mantic revival which in Burke's time was just beginning, 
had, to be sure, enthusiasm ; but this was too conscious to 
seem spontaneous. And although the names of Rogers, 
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Landor, and Moore, who had 
all begun writing before 1800, suggest something like ver- 
satility, it is rather variety. They differ from one another, 
but compared with the Elizabethan poets each seems limited, 
inflexible. Taken together, their works combine in compli- 
cated orchestral harmonies. To the end, however, you can 
hardly imagine any of them as master of more than a single 
instrument. Versatility can hardly be held to characterise 
any English man of letters who came to maturity in the 
eighteenth century. 

So far as Hterature is concerned, then, that century seems 
more and more what the commonplaces of the school-books 
call it, a century of robustly formal tradition; rational, sen- 
sible, prejudiced, and towards the end restless ; admirable and 
manly in a thousand ways, but further, if so may be, from the 
spontaneous, enthusiastic versatility of Elizabethan days than 
was the period of Dryden. Above all, throughout this eight- 
eenth century, English literature, like English history, seems 
more and more marked by that kind of insular temper which 
nowadays we unthinkingly believe always to have character- 
ised the English. 



Ill 

AMERICAN HISTORY FROM 17OO TO 180O 

In broad outline the history of America during the eighteenth 
century seems as different from that of England as was the 
case a century earlier. Two facts which we remarked in 
seventeenth-century America remained unchanged. In the 
first place no one really cared much who occupied the throne. 
To any American, the question of who was sent out as gov- 
ernor was generally more important than that of who sent 
him. In the second place, the absorptive power of the 
native American race remained undiminished, as indeed it 
seems still to remain. Though there was comparatively less 
immigration to America in the eighteenth century than in the 
seventeenth or the nineteenth, there was enough to show our 
surprising power of assimilation. 

In another aspect, the history of America during the eight- 
eenth century is unlike that of the century before. Until 
1700, at least in New England, the dominant English ideal 
had been rather the moral than the political, — the tradition 
of the English Bible rather than that of the Common Law. 
The fathers of New England had almost succeeded in estab- 
lishing " a theocracy as near as might be to that which was 
the glory of Israel." The story of the Mathers shows how 
this theocratic ambition came to grief. Church and State in 
America tended to separate with true Protestant antagonism. 
Once separate, the State was bound to control in public affairs ; 
and so the Church began to decline into such formalism as 
later times, mistaking the lifeless rigidity of Puritan decline 
for the whole story, have been apt to believe all Puritanism. 



AMERICAN HISTORY 7i 

So, speaking very generally, we may call the eighteenth cen- 
tury in America one of growing material prosperity, under 
the chief guidance no longer of the clergy, but rather of that 
social class to whose commercial energy this prosperity was 
chiefly due. 

It is to the eighteenth century, indeed, and to the pre-revo- 
lutionary part of it, that New England families owe most of 
the portraits which still attest their ancestral dignity, now so 
often a thing of the past. The best of these portraits were 
painted by the father of the celebrated Lord Lyndhurst. This 
was John Singleton Copley, a native of Boston who emi- 
grated to England about the time of the Revolution and 
remained there for the rest of his life. Whoever knows 
Copley's American portraits will recognise in the people he 
painted a type of native Americans which had hardly de- 
veloped in the seventeenth century and which hardly survived 
the Revolution. 

These old New England worthies were mostly merchants 
who owed their fortune to their own ability. To take a single 
family, for example, there lived in Cambridge during the seven- 
teenth century a presumably God-fearing man in no way 
related to the dominant clerical class or to the families con- 
spicuous in the government of the colony. He was in some 
small way of trade, he married four times, and he left a great 
many children. One of these removed to Boston, where he 
so prospered as to be able in his last years to present to the 
Second Church, then under the ministry of Cotton Mather, 
a silver communion cup. His son, a grandson of the prolific 
tradesman of Cambridge, became a merchant of local emi- 
nence, whose affairs brought him into correspondence not only 
with England, but with France, Portugal, and the Indies. He 
married a lady whose family from the earliest days of the colony 
had maintained the dignity of what old Yankees used to call 
quality. And Copley painted them both ; and very stately old 
figures they are; and their silver bears a fine coat of arms. 



-ji THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

So far the story is quite like that of prosperous people in 
the old country. The difference lies in the fact that when 
this old Boston worthy had made his fortune he found him- 
self in a society where there was neither a nobility nor a landed 
gentry to deprive him of social distinction. The state of per- 
sonal feeling which ensued, familiar throughout American his- 
tory, was different from what any man of just this class has 
generally felt in England, and more like that of the grander 
merchants of Venice. As a prosperous man of affairs, he felt 
all the unquestioning sense of personal dignity which every- 
where marks the condition of a gentleman. Superficially, 
perhaps in consequence, his manners seem to have become 
rather more like those of fashionable England than had been 
common in earlier America. A fragment from a letter ad- 
dressed him during the Revolution by the rhinister of the 
church where he was for years a deacon will tell something 
of his temper. The reverend gentleman was travelling in the 
Middle States, where he had been impressed by the Moravian 
settlement at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania ; and he commented 
on it as follows : — 

" The Nunnery, as they call it, is an object of curiosity. A picture 
of diligence, but as I could not but observe, much to the ruining of 
their health & to the destruction of the social disposition. About 
sixty or more girls kept entirely to work without any recreation or 
amusement & without any intercourse with men, under the strict 
orders of an Old Maid Governess. Judge how miserable must be 
their condition ! — Their complexions are sallow, & discontentment 
is painted on every countenance. More ordinary people I never saw. 
A remark struck me when I heard an Old Man praise the conduct of 
our soldiers when they were in Bethlehem. He said there was no 
one instance where they attempted the chastity of their women, which 
I could impute to another cause besides their love of virtue. For No 
woman need have against a Man any other armour than her ugliness, 
& the Girls at Bethlehem are well equipped with this Coat of Mail. ''^ 

It is doubtful whether such words would have been apt to 
proceed in eighteenth-century England from a devout dissenting 
minister to a bell-wether of his flock. They read more like 



AMERICAN HISTORY j^ 

the correspondence of men of the world. The Revolution 
destroyed the fortunes and the social leadership of this class. 
To find such people again in America, we must probably 
wait until after the Civil War. 

But, after all, this development of a small class into full 
contemporary vigour, did not much affect what is often called 
the bone and the sinew of the American commonwealth, nor 
indeed did it result in any serious social breach. Our mer- 
cantile aristocracy was not hereditary ; if fortune failed, its 
members reverted almost immediately to the sound old native 
type, and able people were continually making their way into 
that fortunate class whose prosperity the Revolution brought 
to an end. 

Meanwhile throughout the first half of our eighteenth cen- 
tury, external affairs constantly took a pretty definite form. 
Increased commercial prosperity and superficial social changes 
could not alter the fact that until the conquest of Canada the 
English colonies in America were constantly menaced by 
disturbances which Yankee tradition still calls the French and 
Indian wars. These began before the seventeenth century 
closed. In 1690 Sir William Phips captured Port Royal, now 
Annapolis, in Nova Scotia ; later in the year he came to grief 
in an expedition against Quebec itself; in 1704 came the 
still remembered sack of Deerfield in the Connecticut vallev ; 
in 1745 came Sir William Pepperell's somewhat fortuitous 
conquest of Louisbourg ; in 1755 came Braddock's defeat; in 
1 759 came Wolfe's final conquest at Quebec. The whole story 
is excellently told in the works of Francis Parkman. As we 
have seen before, these really record the struggle which de- 
cided the future of America. When the eighteenth century 
began, — as the encircling names of Quebec, Montreal, 
Chicago, St. Louis, and New Orleans may still remind us, — 
it was doubtful whether the continent which is now the 
United States should ultimately be controlled by the traditions 
of England or by those of continental Europe. Throughout 



74 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

the first half of the eighteenth century this question was still 
in doubt, — never more so, perhaps, than when Braddock 
fell in what is now Western Pennsylvania. The victory on 
the Plains of Abraham settled the fate of a hemisphere. Once 
for all, the continent of America passed into the control of 
the race which still maintains there the traditions of the 
English Law. 

In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, there 
declared itself throughout British America a movement which 
throws a good deal of light on American temperament. As 
we saw in our glance at English literature, one of the writers 
still busy in 1750 was John Wesley, the founder of that great 
dissenting sect commonly called Methodist. This originated 
in a fervent evangehcal protest against the corrupt, un spir- 
itualised condition of the English Church during the reign of 
George II. Though Methodism made permanent impression 
on the middle class of England, however, it can hardly be 
regarded in England as a social force of the first historical 
importance. Nor were any of its manifestations there salient 
enough to attract the instant attention of people who consider 
general English history. In America the case was diff^erent. 
During the earlier years of the eighteenth century the Puritan 
churches had begun to stiffen into formalism. Though this 
never went so far as to divorce religion from life, or to let 
native Yankees long forget the main tenets of Calvinism, there 
was such decline of religious fervour as to give the more 
earnest clergy serious ground for alarm. 

In 1738 George Whitefield, perhaps the most powerful of 
English revivalists, first visited the colonies. In that year 
he devoted himself to the spiritual awakening of Georgia. 
In 1740 he came to New England. The Great Awakening 
of religion during the next itv^ years was largely due to his 
preaching. At first the clergy were disposed ardently to wel- 
come this revival of religious enthusiasm. Soon, however, the 
revival took a turn of which we may best form a conception 



AMERICAN HISTORY 75 

by supposing that half the respectable classes of New England 
should fervently abandon their earthly affairs, and, enrolling 
themselves under the banners of the Salvation Army, should 
proceed to camp-meetings of the most enthusiastic disorder. 

The more conservative clergy were alarmed ; in 1 744 
Harvard College formally protested against the excesses of 
Whitefield, and in 1745 Yale followed this example. The 
religious enthusiasm which possessed the lower classes of 
eighteenth-century America, in short, grotesquely outran the 
gravely passionate ecstasies of the immigrant Puritans. So 
late as Cotton Mather's time, the devout of New England 
were still rewarded with mystic visions, wherein divine voices 
and heavenly figures revealed themselves to prayerful keepers 
of fasts and vigils. The Great Awakening which expressed 
itself in mad shoutings and tearing off of garments was more 
like what the earlier Puritans had deemed the diabolical 
excesses of Quakerism. The personal contrast between the 
immigrant Puritans and Whitefield typifies the difference. 
The old ministers had entered on their duties with all the 
authority of scholars from English universities ; Whitefield 
began his career as an inspired potboy who emerged from 
a tavern of the lower kind. Seventeenth-century Puritanism 
was a profound and lasting spiritual power ; Whitefield's re- 
vival was rather an outburst of ranting excess. Yet for all this 
excess the Great Awakening testifies to one lasting fact, — a 
far-reaching spontaneity and enthusiasm among the humble 
classes of America, which, once aroused, could produce social 
phenomena much more startling than Methodism produced in 
King George II. 's England. 

The people who had been so profoundly stirred by this 
Great Awakening were the same who in 1776 declared them- 
selves independent of the mother country. The American 
Revolution is important enough for separate consideration. 
Before speaking of that, we had best consider the literary ex- 
pression of America up to 1776. Here, then, we need only 



76 777^ EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

recall a few dates. The Stamp Act was passed in 1765, the 
year in which Blackstone published the first volume of his 
" Commentaries on the Law of England." Lexington, Con- 
cord, and Bunker Hill came in 1775, the year in which Burke 
delivered his masterly speech on " Conciliation with America," 
On the Glorious Fourth of July, 1776, the Declaration of 
Independence was signed. American independence was finally 
acknowledged by the peace of 1783. The Constitution of 
the United States was adopted in 1789. In 1800 the presi- 
dency of John Adams was drawing to a close, and Washington 
was dead. Now, very broadly speaking, the forces which ex- 
pressed themselves in these familiar facts were forces which 
tended in America to destroy the mercantile class whom Cop- 
ley painted, and to substitute as the ruling class throughout 
the country one more like that which had been stirred by the 
Great Awakening. In other words, the Revolution once 
more brought to the surface of American life the sort of 
natives whom the Great Awakening shows so fully to have 
preserved the spontaneity and the enthusiasm of earlier days. 

A trifling anecdote may perhaps define this somewhat 
vague generalisation. In the Museum of Fine Arts at Bos- 
ton is a room which contains a number of portraits by 
Copley, representing the mercantile aristocracy of the town 
a few years before the American Revolution. To this 
room, not long ago, there chanced to stray a gentleman 
eminent in the political and social life of a modern English 
colony. A shrewd man, of wide experience, he had found the 
United States a little puzzling. The sight of these Copley 
portraits was to him as a burst of light. He laughed, and 
pointing to the wall which their dignity adorns, exclaimed : 
" Why, that 's the sort of people we are ! " The sort of 
people whom Copley painted, in short, still socially and politi- 
cally control the British colonies. Except for the Revolution, 
they might still have controlled America. 

During the eighteenth century, then, America seems slowly 



AMERICAN HISTORY 77 

to have been developing into an independent nationality as 
conservative of its traditions as England was of hers, but less 
obviously so because American traditions were far less 
threatened. The geographical isolation of America combined 
with the absorptive power of our native race to preserve the 
general type of character which America had displayed from 
its settlement. In the history of native Americans, the 
seventeenth century has already defined itself as a period of 
untrammelled inexperience. The fact that American con- 
ditions changed so little until the Revolution implies that this 
national inexperience persisted. [Inexperience leaves character, 
far less altered than can be the case when 'experience accumu- 
lates3 In many superficial aspects, no doubt, particularly if of 
the prosperous class, the native Americans of 1776 appeared 
to be men of the eighteenth century. In personal temper, how- 
ever, Thomas Hutchinson and Samuel Adams were far more 
like John Winthrop and Roger Williams than Chatham and 
Burke were Hke Bacon and Burleigh. One inference seems 
clear : the Americans of the revolutionary period retained to 
an incalculable degree qualities which had faded from ancestral 
England with the days of Queen Elizabeth. 



IV 

LITERATURE IN AMERICA FROM I7OO TO 1 776 

Until 1728, when Cotton Mather died, the general state of 
literature in America remained unaltered. Between 1729 and 
1776, the titles recorded by Whitcomb indicate decided change 
both in the character of the publications and in their distribu- 
tion. Out of some two hundred and thirty of these titles, 
only thirty-seven are precisely religious ; thirty-eight are histor- 
ical ; forty-seven are political ; forty-eight — though none 
have survived in literature — are at least as literary as the 
verses of Wigglesworth or of Mrs. Bradstreet; and the rest — 
including scientific works, almanacs, periodicals, and the like 
— can be classed only as miscellaneous. In religious writing, 
New England remained more prolific than the rest of the 
country ; but the most memorable religious work of this 
period, that of Jonathan Edwards, was produced not in east- 
ern Massachusetts, but in the Connecticut valley, — in other 
words, under the influence not of Harvard College but of 
Yale. Each of the other classes of publication — historical, 
political, literary, and miscellaneous — appeared in slightly 
greater numbers elsewhere than in New England. These 
rough memoranda indicate two significant facts. As the 
material prosperity of America increased, it tended to develop 
the middle colonies; during the greater part of the eighteenth 
century the most important town in America was not Boston, 
but Philadelphia. And though in purely religious writing 
New England kept the lead, the centre of its religious thought 
had shifted from the shore of Massachusetts Bay to that of 
Long Island Sound. 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA TO 1776 79 

Some familiar dates in the history of American education 
emphasise these facts. Yale College, founded in 1700, began 
its career under King William III., until whose reign the only 
established school of higher learning in America had been 
Harvard College, founded under Charles I. The avowed pur- 
pose of the founding of Yale was to maintain the orthodox 
traditions threatened by the constantly growing liberalism of 
Harvard. Under George H., three considerable colleges were 
founded in the middle colonies. In 1746, Princeton College 
was established to maintain an orthodoxy as stout as that of 
Yale. In 1749, partly under the auspices of the American 
Philosophic Society which had lately been founded by Franklin, 
the University of Pennsylvania began an academic history 
which more than any other in America has kept free from 
entanglement with dogma. In 1754, King's College was 
founded at New York, where, under the name of Columbia, 
it still maintains admirable traditions of learning in friendly 
relation with the ancestral Church of England. Meanwhile 
Harvard College had done little more than preserve its own 
prudently liberal traditions, with no marked alteration in either 
character or size. The higher intellectual activity of America 
was clearly tending for a while to centralise itself elsewhere 
than in those New England regions where the American intel- 
lect had first been active. 

During the first half of the eighteenth century, too, there 
had rapidly grown up in America a profusion of periodical pub- 
lications. We had no " Tatler," to be sure, or " Spectator ; " 
but from 1704, when the "Boston News Letter" was estab- 
lished, we had a constantly increasing number of newspapers. 
A dozen years before the Revolution these had everywhere 
become as familiar and as popular, in a country where techni- 
cal illiteracy was rare, as were those annual almanacs which 
had already sprung up in the seventeenth century, and of which 
the most highly developed example was the " Poor Richard's 
Almanac," begun by Franklin in 1733. Pretty clearly, this 



80 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

eighteenth century was a period of growing intellectual activity 
and curiosity among the whole people of America ; and these 
same people were showing disposition to concern themselves 
rather with the affairs of this world than with those of the 
next. 

In the Middle Colonies there was meanwhile developing 
an aspect of religion very different from that which com- 
mended itself to the orthodox Calvinism of New England. 
Undoubtedly the most important religious writing in America 
at the period with which we are now concerned was that of 
Jonathan Edwards. But the memory of another American, 
of widely different temper, has tended, during a century and 
more, to strengthen in the estimation of those who love com- 
fortable spiritual thought expressed with fervid simplicity. 
John Woolman was a Quaker farmer of New Jersey, born in 
1720, who became in 1746 an itinerant preacher, who began 
to testify vigorously against slavery as early as 1753, and 
who died during a visit to England in 1772. His record of 
a vision will show at once why he held himself bound to 
oppose slavery, and how the eternities presented themselves 
to American Quakers of the eighteenth century: — 

" In a time of sickness with the pleurisy, ... I was brought so 
near the gates of death that I forgot my name. Being then desirous to 
know who I was, I saw a mass of matter of a dull, gloomy colour, 
between the south and the east ; and was informed that this mass was 
human beings in as great misery as they could be and live; and that 
I was mixed in with them, and that henceforth I might not consider 
myself as a distinct or separate being. In this state I remained several 
hours. I then heard a soft, melodious voice, more pure and harmoni- 
ous than any I had heard with my ears before ; I believed it was the 
voice of an angel, who spake to the other angels. The words were ; 
*John Woolman is dead.' I soon remembered that I once was John 
Woolman, and being assured that I was alive in the body, I greatly 
wondered what that heavenly voice could mean. . . . 

" I was then carried in spirit to the mines, where poor, oppressed 
people were digging rich treasures for those called Christians, and 
heard them blaspheme the name of Christ, at which I grieved, for his 
name to me was precious. 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA TO 1776 81 

" Then I was informed that these heathen were told that those who 
oppressed them were the followers of Christ ; and they said amongst 
themselves, if Christ directed them to use us in this sort, then Christ 
is a cruel tyrant. 

" All this time the song of the angel remained a mystery ; and in 
the morning my dear wife and some others coming to my bedside, I 
asked them if they knew who I was ; and they telling me I was John 
Woolman, thought I was light-headed, for I told them not what the 
angel said, nor was I disposed to talk much to any one, but was very 
desirous to get so deep that I might understand this mystery. 

" My tongue was often so dry that I could not speak till I had 
moved it about and gathered some moisture, and as I lay still for a 
time, at length I felt divine power prepare my mouth that I could 
speak, and then I said : ' I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I 
live; yet not I, but Christ that liveth in me; and the life I now live in 
the flesh is by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave 
himself for me.' 

" Then the mystery was opened, and I perceived there was joy in 
heaven over a sinner who had repented, and that the language — 
'John Woolman is dead ' — meant no more than the death of my own 
will." 

According to the Quaker faith, in brief, man was not essen- 
tially lost, nor was God the grimly just autocrat of Calvinism. 
The Quakers, to quote one of themselves, " drank in the 
truth of the universal love of God to all men in Christian, 
Jewish, or Pagan lands, that God so loved the world that He 
sent His Son, that Christ died for all men, and that His 
atonement availed for all who in every land accepted the light 
with which He enlightened their minds and consciences, and 
who listening to His still small voice in the soul turned in any 
true sense toward God, away from evil and to the right and 
loving." If we choose, these Quakers held, we may save 
ourselves by voluntarily accepting Christ — by willing atten- 
tion to the still small voice of the Holy Spirit. 

Though words like Woolman's throw light on a growing 
phase of American sentiment, however, they- are not precisely 
literature. Neither was such political writing as we shall con- 
sider more particularly when we come to the Revolution ; nor 
yet was the more scholarly historical writing of which the prin- 

6 



82 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY _ 

cipal example is probably Thomas Hutchinson's " History of 
the Colony of Massachusetts Bay." The first volume of this 
appeared in 1764. Neglected by reason of the traditional 
unpopularity which sincere, self-sacrificing Toryism brought 
on the last native governor of provincial Massachusetts, this 
remains an admirable piece of serious historical writing, not 
vivid, picturesque, or very interesting, but dignified, earnest, 
and just. In the history of pure literature, however, it has 
no great importance. 

Further still from unmixed literature seems the work of the 
two men of this period who for general reasons now deserve 
such separate consideration as we gave Cotton Mather. They 
deserve it as representing two distinct aspects of American 
character, which closely correspond with the two ideals most 
inseparable from our native language. One of these ideals 
is the religious or moral, inherent in the lasting tradition of 
the English Bible ; the other is the political or social, equally 
inherent in the equally lasting tradition of the English Law. 
In the pre-revolutionary years of our eighteenth century, the 
former was most characteristically expressed by Jonathan 
Edwards ; and the kind of national temper which must always 
underlie the latter was incarnate in Benjamin Franklin. Before 
considering the Revolution and the literature which came with 
it and after it, we may best attend to these men in turn. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 

Jonathan Edwards, son of a minister who had been educated 
at Harvard, was born at East Windsor, Connecticut, on Octo- 
ber 5, 1703. In 1720 he took his degree at Yale, where he 
was a tutor from 1724 to 1726. In 1727 he was ordained 
colleague to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, minister of 
Northampton, Massachusetts. Here he remained settled un- 
til 1750, when his growing austerities resulted in his dismissal 
from that ministry. The next year he became a missionary 
to the Stockbridge Indians, in a region at that time remote 
from civilisation. In 1757 he was chosen to succeed his 
son-in-law. Burr, as President of Princeton College. He 
died at Princeton, in consequence of inoculation for small- 
pox, on March 22, 1758. 

Beyond doubt, Edwards has had more influence on subse- 
quent thought than any other American theologian. In view 
of this, the uneventfulness of his life, so utterly apart from 
public affairs, becomes significant of the condition of the New 
England ministry during his lifetime. He was born hardly 
two years after Increase Mather, the lifelong champion of 
theocracy, was deposed from the presidency of Harvard Col- 
lege ; and as our glance at the Mathers must have reminded 
us, an eminent Yankee minister of the seventeenth century 
was almost as necessarily a politician as he was a divine. Yet 
Edwards, the most eminent of our eighteenth-century minis- 
ters, had less to do with public affairs than many ministers of 
the present day. A more thorough divorce of church and 
state than is indicated by his career could hardly exist. 



84 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Nothing less than such separation from public affairs could 
have permitted that concentration on matters of the other 
world which makes the work of Edwards still potent. From 
his own time to ours his influence has been so strong that 
almost all discussions of him are concerned with the question 
of how far his systematic theology is true. For our purposes 
this question is not material, nor yet is that of what his system 
was in detail. It is enough to observe that throughout his 
career, as preacher and writer alike, he set forth Calvinism 
in its most uncompromising form, reasoned out with great 
logical power to extreme conclusions. As for matters of 
earthly fact, he mentioned them only as they bore on his 
theological or philosophical contentions. 

Early in life, for example, he fell in love with Sarah Pierre- 
pont, daughter of a New Haven mmister, and a descendant 
of the great emigrant minister Thomas Hooker, of Hartford. 
Accordingly this lady presented herself to his mind as surely 
among God's elect, an opinion which he recorded when she 
was thirteen years old and he was twenty, in the following 
words : — 

" They say there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of 
that great Being who made and rules the world, and that there are 
certain seasons in which this great Being, in some way or other in- 
visible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, 
and that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on Him ; 
that she expects after a while to be received up where he is, to be 
raised up out of the world and caught up into heaven; being assured 
that he loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from Him 
always. There she is to dwell with Him, and to be ravished with His 
love and delight for ever. Therefore, if you present all the world be- 
fore her, with the richest of its treasures she disregards and cares not 
for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange 
sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections ; is most 
just and conscientious in all her conduct ; and you could not persuade 
her to do anything wrong or sinful, if you would give her the whole 
world, lest she should offend this great Being. She is of a wonderful 
calmness, and universal benevolence of mind ; especially after this 
great God has manifested himself to her mind. She will sometimes 
go about from place to place singing sweetly ; and seems to be always 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 85 

full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be 
alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one 
invisible always conversing with her." 

The spiritual gifts of this chosen vessel of the Lord, who 
in 1727 became Mrs. Edwards, in no way interfered with 
her attention to human duties. During the twenty-three 
years of her husband's ministry at Northampton she bore him 
eleven children, one of whom married the Reverend Aaron 
Burr, first President of Princeton College, and became the 
mother of that other Aaron Burr whose political and social 
career was among the most scandalous of our opening nine- 
teenth century. 

That little record of Edwards's innocent love, which felt 
sure that its object enjoyed the blessings of God's elect, has a 
certain charm. What tradition has mostly remembered of 
him, however, is rather the unflinching vigour with which he 
set forth the inevitable fate of fallen man. His most familiar 
work is the sermon on " Sinners in the Hands of an Angry 
God," of which one of the least forgotten passages runs 
thus : — 

"O sinner! consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great 
furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, 
that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is p'ro- 
voked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the 
damned in hell: — you hang by a slender thread, with the flames of 
divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it 
and burn it asunder ; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and 
nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames 
of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, noth- 
mg that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment. . . . 
• " It is everlasting wrath. It would be dreadful to suffer this fierce- 
ness and wrath of Almighty God one moment ; but you must suffer it 
to all eternity: there will be no end to this exquisite, horrible misery : 
when you look forward you shall see a long for ever, a boundless dura- 
tion before you, which will swallow up your thoughts and amaze your 
soul; and you will absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance, 
any end, any mitigation, any rest at all; you will know certainly that 
you must wear out long ages, millions of miUions of ages, in wrestling 
and conflicting with this Almighty merciless vengeance; and then. 



86 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

when you have so done, when so many ages have actually been spent 
by you in this manner, you will know that all is but a point to what 
remains." 

In view of such doctrine as this, his last sermon to the 
church of Northampton, delivered on June 22, 1750, be- 
comes very grim. His final trouble with his parishioners 
arose from a decay in church discipline which by that time 
had grown conspicuous. In the New England churches there 
had early arisen something called the Half Way Covenant, 
by which those who had received baptism in infancy might in 
turn present their own children for baptism. At first, how- 
ever, no one was admitted either to the Lord's Supper or to 
the voting privileges of a church without performing some 
personal act of public consecration. As time went on, and 
discipline relaxed, many ministers, among them Edwards's 
grandfather Stoddard, began to administer the communion to 
those who were consecrated to the Lord by the Half Way 
Covenant only. The chief ground of Edwards's dispute with 
his congregation was his refusal of the sacrament to persons 
who had not formally joined the church. And here are some 
of the words in which he bade his flock farewell : — 

" My work is finished which I had to do as a minister: You have 
publicly rejected me, and my opportunities cease. 

" How highly therefore does it now become us, to consider of that 
time when we must meet one another before the chief Shepherd? 
When I must give an account of my stewardship, of the service I have 
done for, and the reception and treatment I have had among the 
people he sent me to : And you must give an account of your conduct 
toward me, and the improvement you have made of these three and 
twenty years of my ministry. There is nothing covered that shall not 
be revealed, nor hid which shall not be known ; all will be examined 
in the searching, penetrating light of God's omniscience and glory, and 
by him whose eyes are as a flame of fire ; and truth and right shall be 
made plainly to appear, being stripped of every veil ; and all error, 
falsehood, unrighteousness and injury shall be laid open, stripped of 
every disguise ; every specious pretense, every cavil, and all false 
reasoning shall vanish in a moment, as not being able to bear the 
light of that day. . . - Then every step of the conduct of each of us ia 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 87 

this affair, from first to last, and the spirit we have exercised in all 
shall be examined and manifested, and our own consciences shall speak 
plain and loud, and each of us shall be convinced, and the world shall 
know ; and never shall there be any more mistake, misrepresentation, 
or misapprehension of the affair to eternity." 

This unflinching insistence on sin and its penalty has 
impressed people so deeply that they have been apt to hold 
it comprehensive of Edwards's theological system. Really this 
is far from the case. He stoutly defended the divine justice 
of his pitiless doctrine, to be sure, with characteristically 
impregnable logic : — 

" God is a being infinitely lovely, because he hath infinite excellency 
and beauty. To have infinite excellency and beauty, is the same thing 
as to have infinite loveliness. He is a being of infinite greatness, maj- 
esty, and glory ; and therefore he is infinitely honourable. He is infi- 
nitely exalted above the greatest potentates of the earth, and highest 
angels in heaven ; and therefore is infinitely more honourable than 
they. His authority over us is infinite ; and the ground of his right 
to our obedience is infinitely strong; for he is infinitely worthy to be 
obeyed in himself, and we have an absolute, universal, and infinite 
dependence upon him. 

" So that sin against God, being a violation of infinite obligations, 
must be a crime infinitely heinous, and so deserving of infinite pun- 
ishment.'' 

Yet in spite of all this, he held, God now and again shows 
unmerited mercy, which may by chance be granted to any one 
of us. We have seen already how surely he believed this 
vouchsafed to the lady who became his wife. Here is another 
of his infrequent statements of fact, recording how divine grace 
came to one Phebe Bartlet, a child of Northampton, born in 
March, 1731 : — 

" On Thursday, the last day of July (1735), t^^ child being in the 
closet, where it used to retire, its mother heard it speaking aloud, 
which was unusual, and never had been observed before ; and her 
voice seemed to be as of one exceeding importunate and engaged, but 
her mother could distinctly hear only these words, (spoken in her 
childish manner, but seemed to be spoken with extraordinary earnest- 
ness, and out of distress of soul) Pray Bessed Lord give me salvation ! 
I pray, beg pardon all my sins 1 When the child had done prayer, she 



88 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

came out of the closet, and came and sat down by her mother, and 
cried out aloud. Her mother very earnestly asked her several times, 
what the matter was, before she would make any answer, but she con- 
tinued exceeding crying, and wreathing her body to and fro, like one 
in anguish of spirit. Her mother then asked her whether she was 
afraid that God would not give her salvation. She then answered yes, 
I am afraid I shall go to hell ! Her mother then endeavoured to quiet 
her, and told her that she would not have her cry . . . she must be a 
very good girl, and pray every day, and she hoped God would give 
her salvation. But this did not quiet her at all . . . but she continued 
thus earnestly crying and taking on for some time, till at length she 
suddenly ceased crying and began to smile, and presently said with a 
smiling countenance. . . . Mother the kingdom of heaven is come to 
me ! Her mother was surprised at the sudden alteration, and at the 
speech, and knew not what to make of it, but at first said nothing to 
her. The child presently spake again, and said, there is another come 
to me, and there is another . . . there is three ; and being asked what 
she meant, she answered . . . One is, thy will be done, and there is 
another . . . enjoy him for ever ; by which it seems that when the child 
said, there is three come to me, she meant three passages of its cate- 
chism that came to her mind." 

Hideous as this picture of Puritan infancy must seem in 
certain moods, there are others, and moods which to Edwards 
would have seemed much more rational, in which it takes on 
an aspect of ecstatic beauty. According to the system from 
which he never wavered, the misery and the subsequent joy 
of this little child meant that, for no merit of her own, God 
had been mercifully pleased to receive her into the fellowship 
of the saints, wherein she was destined to enjoy for ever such 
peace as his own words shall describe : — 

" The peace of the Christian infinitely differs from that of the 
worldhng, in that it is unfaihng and eternal peace. That peace which 
carnal men have in the things of this world is, according to the found- 
ation it is built upon, of short continuance ; like the comfort of a 
dream, r John ii. 17, i Cor. vii. 31. These things, the best and most 
durable of them, are like bubbles on the face of the water; they 
vanish in a moment, Hos. x. 7. 

" But the foundation of the Christian's peace is everlasting; it is 
what no time, no change, can destroy. It will remain when the body 
dies ; it will remain when the mountains depart and the hills shall be 
removed, and when the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 89 

The fountain of his comfort shall never be diminished, and the stream 
shall never be dried. His comfort and joy is a living spring in the 
soul, a well of water springing up to everlasting life." 

In plain truth, what people commonly remember of Edwards 
is merely one extreme to which he reasoned out his consistent 
system. Like the older theology of Calvin and of Augustine, 
it all rests on the essential wickedness of the human will, 
concerning which Edwards's great treatise is still held a strong 
bit of philosophising. He asserts something like an utter 
fatalism, a universality of cause affecting even our volition, 
quite beyond human control. This fatal perversion of human 
will he belieyes to spring from that ancestral curse which for- 
bids any child of Adam to exert the will In true harmony with 
the will of God. Reconciliation he holds possible only when 
superhuman power comes, with unmerited grace, to God's 
elect. 

Once accept Edwards's premises, and you will be at pains 
to avoid his conclusions. Yet it is hardly too much to say 
that long ago American posterity has generally rejected both, 
more absolutely indeed than it may come to reject them in 
the future. One can see why. In his American world, so 
relieved from the pressure of external fact that people gener- 
ally behaved much better than is usual in earthly history, 
Edwards, whose personal life was exceptionally removed from 
anything practical, reasoned out with unflinching logic, to 
extreme conclusions, a kind of philosophy which is justified in 
experience only by such things as occur in densely populated, 
corrupt societies. Augustine wrote amid the corruption of 
decadent Rome, whose ruined amphitheatres still testify to 
the brutish riots of pleasure which could subsist amid what 
seemed civilisation, and whose fashionable vices had run in 
men and women alike to more than Neronic excess. Calvin 
reiterated this theology in a Europe where the most potent 
family was the Medici, the Florentine race whose blood com- 
bined with that of degenerate Stuarts to complete the degra- 



90 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

dation of royalty in Charles II., and James, and the Pretenders. 
And, a century and more later, this Jonathan Edwards tried 
logically to extend Calvinism in a world where there were few 
more dreadful exhibitions of human depravity than occasional 
cheating, the reading of eighteenth-century novels, — which 
Edwards is said to have held dangerously obscene, — and such 
artless merry-making and moonlight flirtation as have always 
gladdened youth in the Yankee country. Whoever knew 
American life in the middle of the eighteenth century and 
honestly asked himself whether its manifestations were such 
as the theology of Edwards would explain, could hardly avoid 
a deeper and deeper conviction that even though he was tra- 
ditionally accustomed to accept the premises which so clearly 
involved Edwards's conclusions, somehow these conclusions 
were not so. 

By the middle of the eighteenth century, in short, reli- 
gious thought in America had divorced itself from life almost 
as completely as from politics. The slow result was certain. 
In 1857, nearly a hundred years after the death of Edwards, 
the most familiar and unanswerable comment on his system 
appeared. Often misunderstood, generally thought no more 
than a piece of comic extravagance. Dr. Holmes's " One- 
Hoss Shay " is really among the most pitiless satires in our 
language. Born and bred a Calvinist, Holmes, who lived 
in the full tide of Unitarian hopefulness, recoiled from the 
appalling doctrines which had darkened his youth. He could 
find no flaw in their reasoning, but he would not accept their 
conclusions. In a spirit as earnest, then, as his words seem 
rollicking, he wrote of Edwards thus : — 

" Little of all we value here 
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year 
Without both feeling and looking queer. 
In fact, there 's nothing that keeps its youth, 
So far as I know, but a tree and truth. 
(This is a moral that runs at large ; 
Take it. — You 're welcome. — No extra charge,) 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 91 

"FIRST OF NOVEMBER, —the Earthquake-day, — 
There are traces of age in the one-hoss shay, 
A general flavour of mild decay, 
But nothing local as one may say. 
There could n't be, — for the Deacon's art 
Had made it so like in every part 
That there was n't a chance for one to start. 
For the wheels were just as strong as the thills, 
And the floor was just as strong as the sills, 
And the panels just as strong as the floor, 
And the whipple-tree neither less nor more, 
And the back-crossbar as strong as the fore, 
And spring and axle and hub encore. 
And yet, as a whole, it is past a doubt 
In another hour it will be worn out! 

** First of November, 'Fifty-five ! 
This morning the parson takes a drive. 
Now, small boys, get out of the way ! 
Here comes the wonderful one-hoss shay. 
Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay. 
* Huddup ! ' said the parson. — Off went they. 
The parson was working his Sunday's text, — 
Had got \.o fifthly, and stopped perplexed 
At what the — Moses — was coming next. 
All at once the horse stood still, 
Close by the meet'n'-house on the hill. 
First a shiver, and then a thrill, 
Then something decidedly like a spill, — 
And the parson was sitting upon a rock, 
At half past nine by the meet'n'-house clock, — 
Just the hour of the Earthquake shock I 
What do you think the parson found. 
When he got up and stared around ? 
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound. 
As if it had been to the mill and ground ! 
You see, of course, if you 're not a dunce, 
How it went to pieces all at once, — 
All at once, and nothing first, — 
Just as bubbles do when they burst. 

" End of the wonderful one-hoss shay. 
Logic is logic. That 's all I say." 



VI 

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

The contemporary of Edwards who best shows what Ameri- 
can human nature had become, is Benjamin Franklin. Unlike 
the persons at whom we have glanced, this man, who before 
he died became more eminent than all the rest together, sprang 
from socially inconspicuous origin. The son of a tallow 
chandler, he was born in Boston, on January 6, 1706. As 
a mere boy, he was apprenticed to his brother, a printer, with 
whom he did not get along very well. At seventeen he ran 
away, and finally turned up in Philadelphia, where he attracted 
the interest of some influential people. A year later he went 
to England, carrying from these friends letters which he sup- 
posed might be useful in the mother country. The letters 
proved worthless ; in 1726, after a life in England for which 
vagabond is hardly too strong a word, he returned to Phila- 
delphia. There he remained for some thirty years. He be- 
gan by shrewdly advancing himself as printer, publisher, and 
shopkeeper ; later, when his extraordinary ability had drawn 
about him people of more and more solid character, he became 
a local public man and proved himself also an admirable self- 
taught man of science. About the time of Washington's birth, 
he started that " Poor Richard's Almanac " whose aphorisms 
have had such lasting vogue. It is Poor Richard who told 
us, among other things, that " Early to bed and early to rise, 
makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise ; " that " God helps 
them that help themselves ; " and that " Honesty is the best 
policy." After fifteen years Franklin's affairs had so pros- 
pered that he could retire from shopkeeping and give himself 
over to scientific work. He made numerous inventions : the 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 93 

lightning-rod, for example; the stove still called by his name; 
and double spectacles, with one lens in the upper half for observ- 
ing distant objects, and another in the lower half for reading. 
In 1755 he was made Postmaster-General of the American 
colonies ; and the United States post-office is said still to be 
conducted in many respects on the system he then established. 
So he lived until 1757, the year before Jonathan Edwards 
died. 

In 1757 he was sent to England as the Agent of Pennsyl- 
vania. There he remained, with slight intervals, for eight- 
een years, becoming agent of other colonies too. In 1775 
he returned home, where in 1776 he was a signer of the 
Declaration of Independence. Before the end of that year 
he was despatched as minister to France, where he remained 
until 1785. Then he came home and was elected President 
of Pennsylvania. In 1787 he was among the signers of the 
Constitution of the United States. On the 17th of April, 
1790, he died at Philadelphia, a city to which his influence 
had given not only the best municipal system of eighteenth- 
century America, but also, among other institutions which 
have survived, the American Philosophical Society and the 
University of Pennsylvania. 

The Franklin of world tradition, the great Franklin, is the 
statesman and diplomatist who from 1757 until 1785 proved 
himself both in England and in France to possess such com- 
manding power. But the Franklin with whom we are con- 
cerned is rather the shrewd native American whose first fifty 
years were spent in preparation for his world-wide career. 
He was born, we have seen, a Yankee of the lower class, 
not technically a gentleman. How significant this fact was 
in the middle of the eighteenth century may be seen by a 
glance at any Quinquennial Catalogue of Harvard College. 
In this, from the beginning until 1772, the names of the 
graduates are arranged not in alphabetical order, but in that of 
social precedence. The sons of royal governors and of king's 



94 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

counsellors come first, then sons of ministers and magistrates, 
and so on ; and the records of the College show that an 
habitual form of discipline during this period was to put a 
man's name in his class-list beneath the place to which his 
birth entitled him. To spirited American youths social in- 
feriority is galling ; the effect of it on Franklin's career ap- 
peared in several ways. For one thing he always hated 
Harvard College, and had small love for anything in Massa- 
chusetts; for another, he instinctively emigrated to a region 
where he should not be hampered by troublesome family 
traditions ; for a third, with the recklessness which is apt to 
endanger youth in such a situation, he consorted during his 
earlier life with men who though often clever were loose in 
morals. Before middle life, however, his vagabond period 
was at an end. By strict attention to business and imper- 
turbable good sense, he steadily outgrew his origin. By the 
time he was fifty years old his studies in electricity had gained 
him European reputation ; and in all the American colonies 
there was no practical public man of more deserved local 
importance. 

In the course of this career he had written and published 
copiously. None of his work, however, can be called exactly 
literary. Its purpose was either to instruct people concerning 
his scientific and other discoveries and principles ; or else, as 
in "Poor Richard's Almanac," — perhaps his nearest ap- 
proach to pure letters, — to influence conduct. But if Frank- 
lin's writings were never precisely literature, his style was 
generally admirable. His account in the " Autobiography " 
of how, while still a Boston boy, he learned to write, is at 
once characteristic of his temper and conclusive of his accom- 
plishment : — 

" About this time I met with an odd volume of the * Spectator.' 
It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, 
read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the 
writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 95 

view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the senti- 
ment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without 
looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing 
each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed 
before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then 1 
compared my ' Spectator ' with the original, discovered some of my 
faults, and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, 
or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I 
should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making 
verses ; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, 
but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for 
the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of search* 
ing for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety m my mind, 
and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales and 
turned them into verse ; and, after a time, when I had pretty well for- 
gotten the prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes jumbled 
my collection of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeav- 
oured to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the 
full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method 
in the arrangement of thoughts. My time for these exercises and for 
reading was at night, after work or before 'it began in the morning, or 
on Sundays, when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone, evad- 
ing as much as I could the common attendance on public worship 
which my father used to exact of me when I was under his care, and 
which indeed I still thought a duty, though I could not, as it seemed 
to me, afford time to practice it." 

Sound eighteenth-century English this, though hardly of 
Addisonian urbanity. Even more characteristic than the 
English of this passage, however, is Franklin's feeling about 
religion, implied in its last sentence. The Boston where this 
printer's boy stayed away from church to teach himself how to 
write was the very town where Increase and Cotton Mather 
were still preaching the dogmas of Puritan theocracy ; and a 
few days' journey westward Jonathan Edwards, only three years 
older than Franklin, was beginning his lifelong study of the 
relation of mankind to eternity. To the religious mind of 
New England, earthly Hfe remained a mere fleeting moment. 
Life must always end soon, and death as we see it actually 
seems unending. With this solemn truth constantly in mind, 
the New England Puritans of Franklin's day, like their devout 



96 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

ancestors, and many of their devout descendants, bent their 
whole energy toward eternal welfare as distinguished from 
anything temporal. Yet in their principal town Franklin, a 
man of the plain people, exposed to no influences but those of 
his own day and country, was coolly preferring the study of 
earthly accomplishment to any question which concerned mat- 
ters beyond human life. 

Another extract from his " Autobiography " carries his 
religious history a little further : — 

" My parents had early given me religious impressions, and brought 
me through my childhood piously in the Dissenting way. But I was 
scarce fifteen, when, after doubting by turns of several points, as I 
found them disputed in the different books I read, I began to doubt of 
Revelation itself. Some books against Deism fell into my hands ; 
they were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle's 
Lectures. It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite con- 
trary to what was intended by them ; for the arguments of the deists, 
which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than 
the refutations ; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist. My argu- 
ments perverted some others, particularly Collins and Ralph ; but, each 
of them having afterwards wrong'd me greatly without the least com- 
punction, and recollecting Keith's conduct towards me (who was 
another free-thinker), and my own towards Vernon and Miss Read, 
which at times gave me great trouble, I began to suspect that this 
doctrine, tho' it might be true, was not very useful." 

" Not very useful : " the good sense of Franklin tested 
religion itself by its effects on every-day conduct. 

Later still in his " Autobiography " he tells how he was 
impressed by the ministrations of the only Presbyterian minis- 
ter in Philadelphia, to whose services he paid the willing tribute 
of annual subscription : — 

" He used to visit me sometimes as a friend, and admonish me to at- 
tend his administrations, and I was now and then prevailed on to do 
so, once for five Sundays successively. Had he been in my opinion a 
good preacher, perhaps I might have continued, notwithstanding the 
occasion I had for the Sunday's leisure in my course of study ; but 
his discourses were chiefly either polemic arguments, or exphcations 
of the peculiar doctrines of our sect, and were all to me very dry, un- 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 97 

interesting, and unedifying, since not a single moral principle was in- 
culcated or enforc'd, their aim seeming rather to make us Presbyteri- 
ans than good citizens." 

The spiritual life thus begun, if spiritual it may be called, 
developed as might have been expected. Years afterward, it 
excited painful apprehension in the mind of the great George 
Whitefield, to whom in 1764 Franklin wrote thus: — 

" Your frequently repeated wishes for my eternal, as well as my 
temporal happiness, are very obliging, and I can only thank you for 
them ^nd offer you mine in return. I have myself no doubt, that I 
shall enjoy as much of both as is proper for me. That Being, who 
gave me existence, and through almost threescore years has been con- 
tinually showering his favours upon me ; whose very chastisements 
have been blessings to me; can I doubt that he loves me .'' And, it 
he loves me, can I doubt that he will go on to take care of me, not 
only here but hereafter.? This to some may seem presumption ; to me 
it appears the best grounded hope ; hope of the future built on experi- 
ence of the past." 

The personal relations with Whitefield attested by this let 
ter had begun in 1739, when the revivalist first came to Phila- 
delphia. Here 

" he was at first permitted to preach in some of our churches ; but 
the clergy, taking a dislike to him, soon refused him their pulpits, and 
he was obliged to preach in the fields. The multitudes of all sects 
and denominations that attended his sermons were enormous, and it 
was matter of speculation to me, who was one of the number, to ob- 
serve the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers, and 
how much they admired and respected him, notwithstanding his com- 
mon abuse of them, by assuring them they were naturally half beasts 
and half devils. It was wonderful to see the change soon made m 
the manner of our inhabitants. From being thoughtless or indifferent 
about religion, it seem'd as if all the world were growing religious, so 
that one could not walk thro' the town in an evening without hearing 
psalms sung in different families of every street." 

Franklin, who was employed as printer on many of White- 
field's sermons, soon came to have a high opinion of the 
Methodist's personal honesty. Of his prudence, the shrewd 
Yankee had more doubt ; but at least once Whitefield's preach- 

7 



98 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

ing, with its " wonderful power over the hearts and the purses 
of his hearers," carried him away. The revivah'st wished to 
establish in Georgia a charitable orphanage, which Frankl?n 
thought impracticable. 

" I therefore refused to contribute," writes Franklin. " I happened 
soon after to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I per- 
ceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved 
he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of 
copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. 
As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. 
Another stroke of his oratory made me asham'd oi that, and deter- 
mined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably, that I 
empty'd my pocket wholly into the collector's dish, gold and all." 

Generally, however, Franklin kept his head better. The 
cool scientific temper with which on another occasion he at- 
tended to one of Whitefield's impassioned public discourses is 
more characteristic : — 

" He preach'd one evening from the top of the Court-house steps, 
which are in the middle of Market-street, and on the west side of 
Second-street, which crosses it at right angles. Both streets were 
filled with hearers to a considerable distance. Being among the hind- 
most in Market-street, I had the curiosity to learn how far he could 
be heard, by retiring backwards down the street towards the river; 
and I found that his voice was distinct till I came near Front-street, 
when some noise in that street obscur'd it. Imagining then a semi- 
circle, of which my distance should be the radius, and that it were 
filled with auditors, to each of whom I allowed two square feet, 1 com- 
puted that he might well be heard by more than thirty thousand. 
This reconcil'd me to the newspaper accounts of his having preached 
to twenty-five thousand people in the fields, and to ancient histories 
of generals haranguing whole armies, of which I had sometimes 
doubted." 

Far more in this vein is Franklin's friendly record of their 
personal relations : — 

"The following instance will show something of the terms on which 
we stood. Upon one of his arrivals from England at Boston, he wrote 
to me that he should come soon to Philadelphia, but knew not where 
he could lodge when there, as he understood his old friend and host, 
Mr. Benezet, was removed to Germantown. My answer was, » You 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 99 

know my house ; if you can make shift with its scanty accommodations, 
you will be most heartily welcome.' He reply'd, that if I made that 
kind offer for Christ's sake, I should not miss of a reward. And I re- 
turned, ' Don't let me be mistaken; it was not for Chrisfs sake, but for 
your sake? One of our common acquaintances jocosely remark'd that, 
knowing it to be the custom of the saints, when they received any 
favour, to shift the burden of the obligation from off their own 
shoulders, and place it in heaven, I had contriv'd to fix it on earth." 

To Franklin, indeed, things on earth were of paramount 
importance. He never denied the existence of God, but he 
deemed God a beneficent spirit, abundantly able to take care 
of himself and to take care of us too ; so long then, as men be- 
have decently, they may confidently leave to God the affairs of 
heaven and of hell, if perchance there be one. Franklin's 
God, in short, was much more like that Supreme Being to 
whom Voltaire in his last days erected a classical temple in 
the grounds of Ferney, than like the orthodox God of New 
England, — Him whom in the midst of Franklin's lifetime Jona- 
than Edwards so fervently described as holding sinners for a 
moment above eternal fires into which His angry hand should 
presently drop them. Of earthly morality, meanwhile, so far 
as it commended itself to good sense, Franklin was shrewdly 
careful. No passage in his " Autobiography " is more familiar 
than the list of virtues which he drew up and endeavoured in 
turn to practise. The order in which he chose to arrange 
them is as follows : Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, 
Frugality (under which his little expository motto is very 
characteristic : " Make no expense but to do good to others 
or yourself"). Industry, Sincerity (under which he directs us 
to " Use no hurtful deceit "), Justice, Moderation, Cleanli- 
ness, Tranquillity, Chastity, and finally one which he added 
later as peculiarly needful to him, — Humility. The injunction 
placed under this last is perhaps the most characteristic of all : 
" Imitate Jesus and Socrates." 

Now though all this is sound practical morality of a kind 
which should at once advance a man's earthly prosperity and 



lOO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

incidentally benefit society, it is about as far from the pas- 
sionate morality which should save souls as it is from vice 
itself. The most familiar saying of Poor Richard, " Honesty 
is the best policy," is typical of this. Very likely honesty 
will bring you to heaven, but for the moment that ques- 
tion is immaterial ; if you are honest in this world, you will 
get on here better than if you are not. A profound truth 
this, by the way, particularly for English-speaking people. 
Compared with races of Latin or Greek origin, ours is not 
intellectually alert. Now if you act honestly and tell the 
truth, you play your part in exact accordance with life as 
you see it. On the other hand, begin to cheat, to act dis- 
honestly, or to lie, and you have set up such contradiction of 
fact as you must constantly support by fresh and various mis- 
representation. To alert-minded people a frequent demand 
for mendacious ingenuity often seems stimulating. To peo- 
ple of our sluggish race it is rather bewildering ; English- 
speaking people are the least successful liars in the world. 
Very good : we are of English tradition ; the part of good 
sense, then, is to lie as little as possible, to " use no hurtful 
deceit," to be honest. " Honesty is the best policy." So far 
as conduct goes, worldly wisdom brings us nearly into accord 
with the dogmatic morality of Christianity. In other words, 
such common sense as Franklin's ultimately makes human 
beings behave in a manner so far from superficially damnable 
that you might be at pains to distinguish them from God's 
own elect. 

The deliberate good sense with which Franklin treated 
matters of religion and morality, he displayed equally in his 
scientific writings ; and, a little later, in the public documents 
and correspondence which made him as eminent in diplomacy 
and statecraft as he had earlier been in science and in local 
affairs. His examination before the House of Commons in 
1766 shows him as a public man at his best. A letter to 
a London newspaper, written the year before, shows another 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN loi 

phase of his mind, less frequently remembered. It is a ban- 
tering comment on ignorant articles concerning the American 
colonies which appeared at about this time in the daily 
prints : — 

" I beg leave to say, that all the articles of news that seem improba- 
ble are not mere inventions. The very tails of the American sheep 
are so laden with wool, that each has a little car or wagon on four little 
wheels, to support and keep it from trailing on the ground. Would 
they caulk their ships, would they even litter their horses with wool, 
if it were not both plenty and cheap ? And what signifies the dear- 
ness of labor when an English shilling passes for five-and-twenty ? 
Their engaging three hundred silk throwsters here in one week for 
New York was treated as a fable, because, forsooth, they have 'no 
silk there to throw.' Those, who make this objection, perhaps do not 
know, that, at the same time the agents from the King of Spain were 
at Quebec to contract for one thousand pieces of cannon to be made 
there for the fortification of Mexico, and at New York engaging the 
usual supply of woollen floor carpets for their West India houses, 
other agents from the Emperor of China were at Boston treating 
about an exchange of raw silk for wool, to be carried in Chinese junks 
through the Straits of Magellan. 

"And yet all this is as certainly true, as the account said to be 
from Quebec, in all the papers of last week, that the inhabitants of 
Canada are making preparations for a cod and whale fishery 'this 
summer in the upper Lakes.' Ignorant people may object, that the 
upper Lakes are fresh, and that cod and whales are salt water fish ; but 
let them know, Sir, that cod, like other fish when attacked by their 
enemies, fly into any water where they can be safest ; that whales, 
when they have a mind to eat cod, pursue them wherever they fly; 
and that the grand leap of the whale in the chase up the Falls of 
Niagara is esteemed, by all who have seen it, as one of the finest 
spectacles in nature." 

This passage is noteworthy as an early instance of what 
we now call American humour, — the grave statement, with 
a sober face, of obviously preposterous nonsense. Though 
its style is almost Addisonian, its substance is more like what 
in our own days has given world-wide popularity to Mark 
Twain. 

The character of Franklin is too considerable for adequate 
treatment in any such space as ours ; but perhaps we have 



I02 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

seen enough to understand how human nature tended to de- 
velop in eighteenth-century America, where for a time eco- 
nomic and social pressure was so relaxed. This relaxation, 
indeed, is incidentally attested by two stray passages from 
Franklin's writings. One is in a letter to his wife from 
London, dated the 27th of June, 1760: — 

" The accounts you give me of the marriages of our friends are very 
agreeable. I love to hear of everything that tends to increase the 
number of good people. You cannot conceive how shamefully the 
mode here is a single life. One can scarce be in the company of a 
dozen men of circumstance and fortune, but what it is odds that you 
find on inquiry eleven of them are single. The great complaint is the 
excessive expensiveness of English wives." 

The other is from his celebrated examination before the 
House of Commons in 1766: — 

" Q- What do you think is the reason that the people in America 
increase faster than in England? 

'■'■.A. Because they marry younger, and more generally. 

" Q. Why so .? 

'■'■A. Because any young couple, that are industrious, may easily 
obtain land of their own, on which they can raise a family. 

" Q. Are not the lower ranks of the people more at their ease in 
America than in England? 

'M. They may be so, if they are sober and diligent, as they are 
better paid for their labour." 

From these very lower ranks Franklin himself sprung. Un- 
doubtedly he was what we call great ; his qualities were on a 
larger scale than is common anywhere; but the question of 
scale does not aiFect that of character. Devoting himself 
with unceasing energy, common-sense, and tact to practical 
matters, and never seriously concerning himself with eternity, 
he developed into a living example of such rational, kindly 
humanity as the philosophy of revolutionary PVance held at- 
tainable by whoever should be freed from the distorting influ- 
ence of accidental and outworn institutions. In Jonathan 
Edwards we found theoretical Puritanism, divorced from life, 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 103 

proclaiming more uncompromisingly than ever that human 
nature is damnable. In such temper we jfind on a grand 
scale something akin to the petty enthusiasm of our own day, 
which now and again maintains that whoever takes a glass of 
wine shall sleep in a drunkard's grave, or that whoever smokes 
a cigarette shall smoke for it in hell. All the while we see 
about us godly smokers the better for rational stimulant. 
And all the while when Edwards was preaching his unflinch- 
ing Calvinism, Franklin, by living as well and as sensibly as 
he could, was demonstrating that, at least in America, unaided 
human nature could develop into an earthly shape which 
looked quite as far from damnable as that of any Puritan 
parson. 

The America which in the same years bred Jonathan 
Edwards and Benjamin Franklin bred too the American 
Revolution. 



VII 

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

Like Calvinism, the American Revolution has generally been 
discussed so passionately that in eagerness to prove one side 
right historians have hardly been able to consider the ques- 
tions which arose as matters of mere historic fact. And as 
Professor Tyler's " Literary History " shows, the tradition of 
the Revolution which commonly prevails in the United States 
is a remarkable distortion of a familiar truth. The war which 
began at Lexington and ended six years later with the sur- 
render of Cornwallis at Yorktown has been talked about in 
public places and taught about in schools as if it had been a 
rising against a foreign invader, like the old Spanish wars in 
the Netherlands, or those more recent wars in which the 
Austrians were expelled from what is now united Italy. No 
error could be much graver. Up to 1760 the colonies of 
America were as loyal to the crown of England as Australia or 
Canada is to-day. England, of course, was separated from 
America by the Atlantic Ocean ; and, so far as time goes, the 
North Atlantic of the eighteenth century was wider than the 
equatorial Pacific is to-day. But the people of the Ameri- 
can colonies were as truly compatriots of Englishmen as the 
citizens of our Southern States in i860 were compatriots 
of New England Yankees. The Revolution, in short, was 
a civil war, like the wars of Cavaliers and Round-heads a 
century before in England, or the war in our own country 
between 1861 and 1865. Both of those other civil wars, 
the older English and the newer American, have already faded 
into a past where one can feel them, for all their tragedy, to 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 105 

have something of the character of family quarrels which 
have ended in fresh family concord. What distinguishes the 
American Revolution from other civil wars is the fact that 
the quarrel which produced it a century and a quarter ago 
has never been truly settled or forgotten. 

Already in 1780 American feeling toward England had 
become consciously foreign. Consciously foreign it remains ; 
there are plenty of sensible Americans to-day who really feel 
less strange in Paris than in London. In modern Boston the 
unaltered King's Chapel of the royal governors, surrounded by 
the tombs of colonial worthies, seems almost as much a relic 
of some mysterious past as the ruins of Stonehenge seem on 
Salisbury Plain. Yet one has but to land at Halifax to see a 
surviving image of what Boston was in 1775; Canada to- 
day is English in the sense in which Boston was English 
when George III. ascended the throne. The political fron- 
tier which divides Canada from New England, however, 
remains as distinct as it was when Canada was French; for 
New England now is not English but American. The Ameri- 
can Revolution was a civil war whereof the end is not yet, 
and indeed may never be. 

To those Americans who most cherish our deep national 
ideal of union, this fact has an aspect which may well qualify 
our just pride of independence. This ideal of union means 
that, however much men of common race, language, and prin- 
ciples may diiFer, it is best that they devote their energies to 
neglecting, or at worst to compromising, their differences, and to 
working in common for ends in which all believe, trusting that 
from such common effort better things shall ensue for mankind. 
It needs no great effort of imagination, and as time passes it 
will probably need less and less, to see that this ideal of union 
applies as fully to the events of 1776 as to those of 1861. 
Had the Southern States succeeded in their heroic attempt at 
secession, our country to-day, whatever its condition, must 
have been politically so weak as to make impossible the 



106 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

imperial questions now affecting our politics. If the American 
colonies had failed in their heroic attempt to assert indepen- 
dence of England, there can be little question that by this time 
the imperial dominance of our language, our law, and our 
ideals would be assured throughout the world. The American 
Revolution, then, disuniting the English-speaking race, has 
had on history an effect which those who cherish the moral 
and political heritage of our language may well grow to feel 
in some sense tragic. 

To modern scholars of the critical kind, too, the Revolution 
is becoming more of a puzzle than it used to be. The distor- 
tion of tradition which has represented it rather as a war against 
an alien invader than as a civil war, is not our only popular 
error. American writings, in general, tell only one side of 
the story ; and we have been accustomed to accept their ex 
parte^ though sincere, assertions as comprehensive. So much 
is this the case that few remember the origin of a phrase which 
from a political letter written by Rufus Choate in 1856 has 
passed into idiomatic use. This phrase, " glittering generality," 
is commonly used of empty rhetoric : Mr. Choate used it of a 
piece of rhetoric which American tradition is apt to believe 
the least empty in our history. His words were : " The 
glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which 
make up the Declaration of Independence." Now, to describe 
the Declaration of Independence as a tissue of glittering gener- 
alities is by no means to tell its whole story ; but so to 
describe it is probably as near the truth as X.6 accept it for a 
sober statement of historic fact. Not that Jefferson, who 
wrote it, or his compatriots who signed it, were insincere ; the 
chances are that they believed what they said. But the fact 
that in a moment of high passion a man believes a thing does 
not make it true. And when under the cool scrutiny of pos- 
terity fervid convictions prove somewhat mistaken, the vital 
question is from what they arose. 

Professor Tyler collects and arranges as never before 



' THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 107 

material which may help one to hazard an answer to this 
question. Although in pure literature the Revolution has left 
no more permanent record than was left by the century and a 
half which came before, it was almost as fruitful of publication 
bearing on contemporary fact as were those Civil Wars of Eng- 
land which resulted in the execution of King Charles I. and the 
momentary dominance of Cromwell's Puritanism. Professor 
Tyler is a thoroughly patriotic American citizen; this does not 
prevent him from setting forth with full sympathy a fact which 
any one who reads the long-neglected writings of the Ameri- 
can loyalists must be brought to acknowledge. Right or wrong, 
these loyalists were sincerely patriotic, too, and willing, when 
the crucial moment came, to sacrifice fortune and home to the 
principles which they held as devoutly as ever revolutionist 
held his. What is more, as one considers to-day the arguments 
of the loyalists, it is hard to feel them legally weaker than those 
which finally prevailed. Rather one begins to feel that the 
two sides misunderstood one another more profoundly than 
has yet been realised. They used the same terms, but they 
assumed them to mean widely different things. 

Take, for example, one of the best- remembered phrases of 
the period, — " no taxation without representation." What 
does this really mean ? To the American mind of to-day, as 
to the mind of the revolutionary leaders in King George's 
colonies, it means that no constituency should be taxed by a 
legislative body to which it has not actually elected representa- 
tives, generally resident within its limits. To the English 
mind of 1770, more than sixty years before the first Reform 
Bill, it meant something very different. In England to this 
day, indeed, the notion that a representative should be resident 
in his constituency is as strange as to any American it is 
familiar. Not only was this the case in eighteenth-century 
England, but many boroughs which returned members to 
Parliament had hardly any residents ; while some of the chief 
cities in the kingdom returned no members at all. In King 



io8 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

George's England, we see, the question of representation had 
little to do with actual suffrage. What no taxation with- 
out representation meant there, was that no British subject 
should be taxed by a body where there was not somebody to 
represent his case. This view, the traditional one of the 
English Common Law, was held by the loyalists of America. 
When the revolutionists complained that America elected 
no representatives to Parliament, the loyalists answered that 
neither did many of the most populous towns in the mother 
country ; that the interests of those towns were perfectly well 
cared for by members elected elsewhere ; and that if any- 
body should inquire what members of Parliament were pro- 
tecting the interests of the American colonies, the answer 
would instantly satisfy any complaint. This contention is really 
strong. Among the men who defended the American cause in 
the House of Commons were the elder Pitt, Fox, and Burke. 
It is doubtful whether New England or Virginia could have 
exported to Parliament representatives in any respect superior. 
But the argument of the American loyalists — Tories, we 
have called them for the last century or so, but a truer name 
were Imperial Unionists — had no effect on the revolutionists, 
— patriots. Imperial Secessionists. The course of the equally 
sincere arguments of this party may be typified in two brief 
extracts from the utterances of one of their first heroes, — 
James Otis. In February, 1761, having resigned the office 
of Advocate-General because he would not support an ap- 
plication to the Superior Court for writs of assistance, he 
appeared against them, and among other things spoke as 
follows : — 

" I shall not think much of my pains in this cause, as I engaged 
in it from principle. I was solicited to argue this cause as advocate- 
general ; and because I would not, I have been charged with desertion 
from my office. To this charge I can give a very sufficient answer. 
I renounced that office, and I argue this cause, from the same prin- 
ciple ; and I argue it with the greater pleasure, as it is in favour of 
British liberty, at a time when we hear the greatest monarch upon 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 109 

earth declaring from his throne that he glories in the name of Briton, 
and that the orivileges of his people are dearer to him than the most 
valuable prerogatives of his crown ; and as it is in opposition to a 
kind of power, the exercise of which, in former periods of English 
history, cost one king of England his head, and another his throne. 
. . . The writ prayed for in this petition, being general, is illegal. . . . 

" Let us see what authority there is for it. Not more than one 
instance can be found in all our law books ; and that was in the zenith 
of arbitrary power, namely, in the reign of Charles II., when star- 
chamber powers were pushed to extremity by some ignorant clerk of 
the exchequer. But had this writ been in any book whatsoever, it 
would have been illegal. All precedents are under control of the 
principles of law. Lord Talbot says it is better to observe these than 
any precedents. . . . No acts of Parliament can establish such a 
writ. . . . An act against the constitution is void." 

Otis, in short, a trained lawyer, argued this case on grounds 
of strict legal precedent. A year later this same James Otis 
published a pamphlet entitled " The Vindication of the House 
of Representatives," wherein the basis of his argument is as 
remote from Common Law temper as it is agreeable to the 
abstract philosophy of Revolutionary France : — 

" I. God made all men naturally equal. 2. The ideas of earthly 
superiority, pre-eminence, and grandeur are educational ; — at least 
acquired, not innate. 3. Kings were, — and plantation governors 
should be, — made for the good of the people, and not the people 
for them. 4. No government has a right to make hobby-horses, 
asses, and slaves of the subjects, nature having made sufficient of the 
two former, . . . but none of the last, — which infallibly proves they 
are unnecessary. 5. Though most governments are 'de facto' 
arbitrary, and consequently the curse and scandal of human nature, 
yet none are ' de jure ' arbitrary." 

The latter of these utterances by Otis is doubtless the more 
characteristic of our revolutionary temper, and perhaps of 
what has since been the native temper of America. In the 
former case his argument, like that of any sound lawyer, is 
concerned with the question of what the law is ; in the latter, 
his argument is concerned with a very different question, 
extremely foreign to the legal traditions of England, — namely, 
what the law ought to be. At least in New England, one 



no THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

can see why the latter kind of reasoning proved so agreeable 
to general sentiment. A century and a half of incessant 
theological discussion had made the native Yankee mind far 
more accessible to moral arguments than to legal. By the 
middle of the eighteenth century, then, native Americans 
were more affected by general principles than vt^ere the native 
English. 

Again, as the Great Awakening of 1740 showed, the 
American temper of revolutionary times was more explosive 
than the English, just as American temper remains to-day. 
No living creature, to be sure, is more tenacious of rights than 
an Englishman, but until you meddle with him he is not very 
apt to trouble himself about what you say. To this day, on the 
other hand, Americans get highly excited about mere phrases 
with which they happen not to agree. So it was in the last 
days of British dominion here. At the time of the Stamp 
Act the house of Thomas Hutchinson, Lieutenant-Governor 
of Massachusetts, and a thoroughly patriotic New Englander, 
was sacked by a mob ; and his library and collection of his- 
torical papers were destroyed as ruthlessly as were his mirrors 
and his furniture. In 1764 the house of Martin Howard, a 
Tory gentleman of Newport, who had ventured to answer 
the pamphlets of James Otis, was similarly destroyed. In 
1775 Samuel Seabury, afterwards the ancestral bishop of the 
Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States, was sub- 
jected, together with his family, to a brutal mob violence, 
which only stopped short of outrage and murder. He was 
believed to be the author of some strong loyalist arguments 
signed " A Westchester Farmer ; " and though he was an 
admirably devoted parish priest, nothing could protect him, 
an advocate of unpopular principles, from the explosive 
violence of the Connecticut mob. By 1775, in short, the 
misunderstanding between the temper of native America and 
that of the mother country had got beyond the point of 
argument. 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION in 

The fact that Seabury was a clergyman of the Church of 
England, though it had little to do with his uncomfortable 
experience, recalls a half- forgotten phase of New England 
temper which freshly illustrates this honest international mis- 
understanding of what seem the simplest terms. ^ As is well 
known, no clergyman of the Church of England can receive 
orders except at the hands of a bishop. In the American 
colonies there were no bishops. Any American who desired 
to become a clergyman of what is now our Episcopal Church, 
then, was compelled to go abroad for ordination. Chiefly 
to avert this hardship, certain churchmen, both in England 
and in America, began a movement for the establishment of 
bishoprics in the American colonies. Whoever has followed 
the history of Anglican episcopacy from the time of Charles 
II. onward will feel pretty sure that such bishoprics would 
have had no more political effect than have those of our 
present Episcopal Church. In colonial times, however, even 
among Americans of high intelligence, the mere word " bishop " 
revived in pristine fervour not only all the hatred, but all the 
dread which had been excited in the minds of the ancestral 
Puritans by the persecutions of Laud. An innocent desire 
that devout American Episcopalians might obtain holy orders 
without crossing the Atlantic was honestly regarded by hun- 
dreds of other Americans as an effort to impose upon the 
religious freedom of the colonies the absolute domination of 
an intolerant and persecuting established Church. At least in 
ecclesiastical matters, the instinctive temper of revolutionary 
Americans remained surprisingly like that of their immigrant 
ancestors born under Queen Elizabeth. 

The American Revolution, we begin to see, which resulted 
in imperial disunion, sprang from a deep temperamental mis- 
understanding between the native English and their American 

^ This line of thought was suggested by the thesis for which Dr. Cross was 
awarded the degree of Ph.D. and the Toppan Prize at Harvard University 
in 1899. 



112 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

compatriots. Of this symptoms may be found on all sides. 
Professor Tyler shows, more definitely than has ever been 
shown before, what extraordinary power of political pamphlet- 
eering developed here during the revolutionary period. In the 
contemporary England, of course, there was plenty of such 
pamphleteering. Those masterpieces which were signed by 
the name of Junius were hardly a dozen years old ; and Dr. 
Johnson himself was, among other things, a writer of political 
pamphlets. In native English literature, however, the most 
salient period of political pamphleteering is probably the reign 
of Queen Anne, when, to go no further, so much of the 
work of Arbuthnot, of Defoe, and of the masterly Swift took 
this form. If one looks further back, too, one may find Eng- 
land flooded with political pamphlets during the civil wars of 
Cavaliers and Roundheads. The political pamphlets of revo- 
lutionary America, of course, like the impassioned outbursts 
of Otis and of Patrick Henry and of the other orators whose 
names are preserved in our manuals of patriotic elocution, 
were phrased in the style of the eighteenth century. What- 
ever their phrasing, nevertheless, these pamphlets indicate in 
our country a kind of intellectual activity which in England 
had displayed itself most characteristically a hundred years 
earlier. More and more, one begins to think, the secret of 
the American Revolution may be found in the fact that while 
under the influence of European conditions the English tem- 
perament had steadily altered from that of spontaneous, en- 
thusiastic, versatile Elizabethans to that of stubborn, robust 
John Bull, the original American temper, born under Elizabeth 
herself, had never deeply changed. 

What the difference was, to be sure, may long remain a 
matter of dispute ; but before the end of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, native Americans had begun to feel it. Francis Hopkin- 
son, a remarkably vivacious and spirited writer, was among 
the first to specify the fact. A Philadelphia gentleman 
born in 1737, he saw something of good society in England 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 113 

between 1766 and 1768. He was a signer of the Declaration 
of Independence ; and he died United States District Judge 
for Pennsylvania in 1791. His only familiar work is his 
satirical poem, " The Battle of the Kegs ; " but his writings 
in general are entertaining ; and in the posthumous collec- 
tion of his works is a passage, apparently written during the 
revolutionary period, which shows beyond question that he felt 
as distinctly as people feel to-day how different the tempera- 
ments of England and of America had become : — 

"This infatuated [English] people have wearied the world for these 
hundred years with loud eulogiums upon liberty and their constitu- 
tion ; and yet they see that constitution languishing in a deep decay 
without making any effort for its recovery. Amused with trifles, and 
accustomed to venality and corruption, they are not alarmed at the 
consequences of their supineness. They love to talk of their glorious 
constitution because the idea is agreeable, and they are satisfied with 
the idea ; and they honour their king, because it is the fashion to honour 
the king. . . . 

" The extreme ignorance of the common people of this civilised 
country can scarce be credited. In general they know nothing be- 
yond the particular branch of business which their parents or the 
parish happened to choose for them. This, indeed, they practise with 
unremitting diligence ; but never think of extending their knowledge 
farther. 

"A manufacturer has been brought up a maker of pin-heads; he 
has been at this business forty years and, of course, makes pin-heads 
with great dexterity; but he cannot make a whole pin for his life. 
He thinks it is the perfection of human nature to make pin-heads. 
He leaves other matters to inferior abilities. It is enough for him 
that he believes in the Athanasian creed, reverences the splendour of 
the court, and makes pin-heads. This he conceives to be the sum- 
total of religion, politics and trade. He is sure that London is the 
finest city in the world ; Blackfriars Bridge the most superb of all 
possible bridges ; and the river Thames, the largest river in (the) 
universe. It is vain to tell him that there are many rivers in America, 
in comparison of which the Thames is but a ditch ; that there are 
single provinces there larger than all England ; and that the colonies 
formerly belonging to Great Britain, now independent states, are 
vastly more extensive than England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, 
taken all together — he cannot conceive this. He goes into his best 
parlour, and looks on a map of England, four feet square ; on the 
other side of the room he sees a map of North and South America, 

8 



114 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

not more than two feet square, and exclaims ; — ' How can these things 
be? Ifr is altogether impossible.' He has read the Arabian Nights' 
Entertainment, and he hears this wonderful account of America ; — 
he believes the one as much as the other. . . . 

" It is not so in America. The lowest tradesman there is not with- 
out some degree of general knowledge. They turn their heads to 
everything ; their situation obliges them to do so. A farmer there 
cannot run to an artist upon every trifling occasion. He must make 
and mend and contrive for himself. This I observed in my travels 
through that country. In many towns and in every city they have 
public libraries. Not a tradesman but will find time to read. He 
acquires knowledge imperceptibly. He is amused with voyages and 
travels and becomes acquainted with the geography, customs, and com- 
merce of other countries. He reads political disquisitions and learns 
the great outlines of his rights as a man and as a citizen. He dips a 
little into philosophy, and knows that the apparent motion of the sun 
is occasioned by the real motion of the earth. In a word, he is sure 
t!iat, notwithstanding the determination of the king, lords, and com- 
mons to the contrary, two and two can never make five. 

" Such are the people of England, and such the people of America." 

It is worth while to compare with this sketch of Hopkin- 
son's a passage concerning Americans written a little later by 
a Frenchman, named CreveccEur, who resided near New York 
from 1754 to 1780 : — 

"What then is the American, this new man? He is either a Euro- 
pean or a descendant of a European, hence that strange mixture of 
blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to 
you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was 
Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four 
sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, 
who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, 
receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the 
new government he obeys, the new rank he holds. He becomes an 
American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. 

" Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, 
whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the 
world. Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along 
with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which 
began long since in the East ; they will finish the great circle. The 
Americans were once scattered all over Europe ; here they are incor- 
porated into one of the finest systems of population which has ever 
appeared, and which hereafter will become distinct by the power of 
the different climates they inhabit. The American is a new man, who 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 115 

acts upon new principles ; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and 
form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, 
penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different 
nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. — This is an American." 

The contrast between these two passages is sharp. Hop- 
kinson's American is, after all, a human being ; Crevecoeur's 
American is no more human than some ideal savage of Vol- 
taire; and yet, in Crevecoeur's time and since, it has been 
the fashion to suppose that the French understand us better 
than our true brothers, the English. 

For this there is a certain ground. Englishmen are not 
accessible to general ideas ; and they are not explosive. The 
French are both ; and so, like the subjects of Queen Eliza- 
beth, are the native Americans. Since 1775, then, America 
has often seemed more nearly at one with France than with 
England. Suggestive evidence of a deeper truth may be 
found in the career of the national hero whom the French 
cherish in common with ourselves, — Lafayette. Stirred by 
enthusiasm for the rights of man, he offered his sword to those 
rebellious colonies whom he believed to be fighting for mere 
abstract principles ; and he had warrant for his belief, in the 
glittering gv^neralities of the Declaration of Independence. He 
saw our Revolution triumphant. He went back to France, 
and saw the Revolution there end in tragic failure. To the 
last he could never guess why the abstract principles which 
had worked so admirably in America would not work in 
France. The real truth he never perceived. Whatever 
reasons the revolutionary Americans gave for their conduct, 
their underlying impulse was one which they had inherited 
unchanged from their immigrant ancestors j namely, that the 
rights for which men should die are not abstract but legal. 
The abstract phrases of the American Revolution, deeply as 
they have affected the surface of American thought, remain 
superficial. By 1775, however, the course of American his- 
tory had made our conception of legal rights different from that 



ii6 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

of the English. We had developed local traditions of our 
own, which we believed as immemorial as ever were the local 
traditions of the mother country. The question of represen- 
tation, for example, was not abstract ; it was one of established 
constitutional practice ; but when we came to discussing it, 
we did not understand each other's terms. Misunderstanding 
followed, a family quarrel, a civil war, and world disunion. 
Beneath this world disunion, all the while, is a deeper fact, 
binding America and England at last together at heart, — each 
really and truly believed itself to be asserting the rights which 
immemorial custom had sanctioned. Revolutionary France, 
on the other hand, tried to introduce into human history a 
system of abstract rights different from anything which ever 
flourished under the sun. Naturally it came to grief. And 
Lafayette, who never even in his dreams suspected the force 
and vitality of that Common Law tradition which is instinc- 
tively cherished by every English-speaking race, never under- 
stood what either revolution really signified. 

Slight, vague, and cursory as our consideration has been, 
we can now perhaps begin to see what the American Revo- 
lution means. By 1775, the national experience which had 
been accumulating in England from the days of Queen Eliza- 
beth had brought the temper of the native English to a state 
very remote from what this native temper had been under the 
Tudor sovereigns. In that same year the lack of economic 
pressure to which we have given the name of national in- 
experience had kept the original American temper singularly 
unaltered. When at last, on the accession of George IIL, 
legal and constitutional questions were presented in the same 
terms to English-speaking temperaments on different sides of 
the Atlantic, these temperaments had been forced, by mere 
historic circumstance, so far apart that they honestly could 
not understand each other. Neither of them, then, would 
have been true to the deepest traditions of their common 
race, had anything less than the Revolution resulted. 



VIII 

LITERATURE IN AMERICA FROM 1 776 TO 1 80O 

The first six chapters of Mr. Henry Adams's " History of 
the United States " admirably set forth the stagnation of 
mental life in America between the close of the Revolution 
and the beginning of the nineteenth century. For half a 
generation or more our newly independent country was 
adrift j the true course of our national life was slow in de- 
claring itself. Until the very end of the eighteenth century, 
then, we remained without trace of lasting literature. But 
just as in earlier periods there had been writing which a study 
like ours cannot quite neglect, so during the last quarter of 
this eighteenth century there was a good deal of publication at 
which we must glance. 

One fact is instantly salient. No one who has written of 
our literary expression during the period in question has made 
much distinction between public men and those who for cour- 
tesy's sake may be styled pure men of letters. It is doubtful 
whether anything could much more have surprised Washing- 
ton, or John Adams, or Jefferson, or Madison, or Hamilton, 
or the rest, than to find themselves discussed in the literary 
history of their country much as their eminent contemporary 
Dr. Johnson is discussed in the literary history of England. 
Without doubt, however, the father of our country, together 
with that eminent band of political obstetricians who co- 
operated at its birth, not only displayed practical skill, but 
also wrote memorably about the matters which engaged their 
attention. So, for want of any memorable literature during 
our early years of independence, our literary historians have 



ii8 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

been glad to treat our elder public men as men of letters 
too. 

In this the historians have been right. During the last 
quarter of the eighteenth century our public men wrote in 
admirable style. They were earnestly thoughtful ; they had 
strong common sense; they were far-sighted and temperate; 
and they expressed themselves with that dignified urbanity 
which in their time marked the English of educated people. 
In purely literary history, however, they can hardly be re- 
garded as much more important than Blackstone is in the 
literary history of England. 

This kind of American writing reached its acme in 1787 
and 1788, when Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay supported 
the still unaccepted Constitution of the United States in a 
remarkable series of political essays, named the " Federalist." 
As a series of formal essays, the " Federalist " groups itself 
roughly with the " Tatler," the " Spectator," and those 
numerous descendants of theirs which fill the literary records 
of eighteenth-century England. It differs, however, from all 
these, in both substance and purpose. The " Tatler," the 
" Spectator," and their successors dealt with superficial mat- 
ters in a spirit of literary amenity : the " Federalist " deals, 
in an argumentative spirit as earnest as that of any Puritan 
divine, with political principles paramount in our history ; and 
it is so wisely thoughtful that one may almost declare it the 
permanent basis of sound thinking concerning American con- 
stitutional law. Like all the educated writing of the eight- 
eenth century, too, it is phrased with a rhythmical balance 
and urbane polish which give it claim to literary distinction. 
After all, however, one can hardly feel it much more signifi- 
cant in a history of pure letters than are the opinions in which 
a little later Judge Marshall and Judge Story developed and 
expounded the constitutional law which the " Federalist " 
commented on. Its true character appears when we remem- 
ber the most important thing published in England during the 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA, 1 776-1800 119 

same years, — the poetry of Robert Burns. The contrast 
between Burns and the " Federalist " tells the whole literary 
story. Just as in the seventeenth century the only serious 
literature of America was a phase of that half-historical, half- 
theological sort of work which had been a minor part of Eng- 
lish literature generations before ; so in the eighteenth century 
the chief product of American literature was an extremely ripe 
example of such political pamphleteering as in England had 
been a minor phase of letters during the period of Oueen 
Anne. Pure letters in America were still to come. 

Even during the seventeenth century, however, as we saw 
in our glance at the "Tenth Muse," Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, 
there had been in America sporadic and consciously imitative 
efforts to produce something literary. So there were during 
the eighteenth century. We had sundry writers of apho- 
ristic verse remotely following the tradition of Pope; and we 
had satire, modelled on that of Charles Churchill, a popular 
contemporary writer, now remembered mostly because some 
of our ancestors paid him the compliment of imitation. 
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, a little 
group of clever and enthusiastic men made a serious attempt 
to establish a native literature ; and though the results of this 
effort were neither excellent nor permanent, the effort was 
earnest and characteristic enough to deserve attention. 

To understand its place in our literary records we must 
recall something of our intellectual history. This may be 
said to have begun with the foundation of Harvard College 
as a seminary of scholarly tradition in 1636. Throughout 
the seventeenth century. Harvard, then the only school of 
the higher learning in America, remained the only organised 
centre of American intellectual life. Cotton Mather, we re- 
member, was a Harvard graduate, a member of the Board of 
Overseers and of the Corporation, and an eager aspirant for 
the presidency of the college. Long before his busy life was 
ended, however, the tendency toward liberalism which has 



120 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

remained characteristic of Harvard had swerved it from the 
old Puritan tradition ; and Yale College, the stronghold of 
New England orthodoxy, had consequently been established 
in New Haven. It was from Yale that Jonathan Edwards 
emerged. The fact that the centre of American intellectual 
life was no longer on the shores of Boston Bay was again 
attested by the career of Franklin, who, though born in Boston, 
lived mostly in what during his time was the principal city of 
America, — Philadelphia. In what we said of the "Federalist," 
too, the same trend was implied. Boston bred revolutionary 
worthies, of course : James Otis was a Massachusetts man, so 
were John and Samuel Adams, so earlier was Thomas Hutchin- 
son, so later was Fisher Ames. But of the chief writers of 
the " Federalist," Hamilton and Jay were from New York ; 
and Madison was one of that great school of Virginia public 
men which included Patrick Henry and Jefferson and Wash- 
ington, and Marshall, and many more. In the American per- 
spective of the eighteenth century, Eastern Massachusetts does 
not loom so large in the foreground as Massachusetts tradition 
would have us believe. 

It is not surprising, then, that the highest literary activity 
of the later eighteenth century in America had its origin at 
Yale College. The most eminent of the men of letters then 
developed there was Timothy Dwight, a grandson of Jonathan 
Edwards. He took his degree in 1769, and remained a tutor 
at Yale until 1777. He then became for a year a chaplain in 
the Continental Army. While tutor at Yale he co-operated 
with his colleague, John Trumbull, in the production of some 
conventional essays modelled on the " Spectator." While 
chaplain in the army he wrote a popular song entitled 
" Columbia." Of this the last of its six stanzas is a suffi- 
cient example ; the last couplet repeats the opening words of 
the poem : — 

" Thus, as down a lone valley, with cedars o'erspread, 
From war's dread confusion I pensively strayed — 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA, 1 776-1800 121 

The gloom from the face of fair heaven retired ; 

The winds ceased to murmur ; the thunders expired; 

Perfumes, as of Eden, flowed sweetly along, 

And a voice, as of angels, enchantingly sung ; 

' Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise. 

The queen of the world, and the child of the skies.' " 

In 1783 Dwight became minister of Greenfield, Connec- 
ticut. In I 795 he was made President of Yale College, an 
office which he held to his death in 181 7; and certainly until 
the time of President Woolsey his name was the most dis- 
tinguished in the academic annals of Yale. As President, he 
wrote his posthumously published " Travels in New England 
and New York," which record experiences during a number 
of summer journeys and remain an authority on the condition 
of those regions during his time. He did some sound work 
in theology too ; but by this time Calvinistic theology belongs 
apart from pure letters even in America. In 1788, however, 
he expressed some of his ecclesiastical views in a poem en- 
titled " The Triumph of Infidelity," of which one passage is 
well worth our notice. 

To appreciate what it means we must again glance for a 
moment at Boston. Here for a century the pulpits had been 
steadily tending toward liberalism. Among the chief churches 
of Boston was, and remains. King's Chapel, the official place 
of worship of the royal governors, who were generally mem- 
bers of the Church of England. At the time of the Revolu- 
tion the ministers of this communion, whose ordination vows 
bound them to personal allegiance just as firmly as to the 
thirty-nine articles, generally emigrated. So in 1785 King's 
Chapel found itself in charge of an excellent native divine 
named James Freeman, who was not an ordained clergymari 
of the English Church. The immemorial religious habit of 
the congregation made it desirable that the services of King's 
Chapel should be conducted in accordance with the Anglican 
liturgy; but in view of the new state of sovereignty in Amer- 
ica this liturgy obviously required amendment. Dr. Freeman 



122 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

took occasion to amend it pretty radically. In the liturgy 
which has been employed at King's Chapel from his time to 
our own, although the general form of the episcopal service is 
preserved rather more nearly than the episcopal service pre- 
serves that of the Church of Rome, there is occasional avoid- 
ance of the Holy Ghost. In consequence, the publication of 
the King's Chapel liturgy has sometimes been held the begin- 
ning of the Unitarian movement in New England. Certainly, 
too, along with this insistence on the unity of God, as distin- 
guished from the mysteries of Trinity, Dr. Freeman's teaching 
tended to agree with that which has since been fashionable in 
Boston, by emphasising the more amiable as distinguished from 
the more terrible aspects of Deity. As we shall see later, 
the theology of nineteenth-century Massachusetts has occupied 
itself in so thickly freezing over the Calvinistic hell that to 
this day those who slide about on its surface, particularly in 
the neighbourhood of Harvard College, are disposed to deny 
that there were ever any brimstone fires at all. 

To the orthodoxy of Yale this tendency was abhorrent ; and 
Dwight's " Triumph of Infidelity " thus attacks the type of 
ecclesiastic who was to develop into such eminent spiritual 
leaders as Channing, Emerson, and Phillips Brooks : — 

" There smiled the smooth Divine, unused to wound 
The sinner's heart, with hell's alarming sound. 
No terrors on his gentle tongue attend ; 
No grating truths the nicest ear offend. 
That strange new-birth, that methodistic grace, 
Nor in his heart nor sermons found a place. 
Plato's fine tales he clumsily retold, 
Trite, fireside, moral seesaws, dull as old ; 
His Christ and Bible placed at good remove, 
Guilt hell-deserving, and forgiving love. 
'T was best he said, mankind should cease to sin : 
Good fame required it : so did peace within. 
Their honours, well he knew, would ne'er be driven; 
But hoped they still would please to go to heaven. 
Each week he paid his visitation dues ; 
Coaxed, jested, laughed ; rehearsed the private news ; 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA, 1 776-1800 123 

Smoked with each goody, thought her cheese excelled; 
Her pipe he Ughted, and her baby held. 
Or placed in some great town, with lacquered shoes, 
Trim wig, and trimmer gown, and glistening hose, 
He bowed, talked politics, learned manners mild ; 
Most meekly questioned, and most smoothly smiled ; 
At rich men's jests laughed loud, their stories praised ; 
Their wives' new patterns gazed, and gazed, and gazed; 
Most daintily on pampered turkeys dined ; 
Nor shrunk with fasting nor with study pined ; 
Yet from their churches saw his brethren driven, 
Who thundered truth, and spoke the voice of heaven, 
Chilled trembling guilt, in Satan's headlong path, 
Charmed the feet back, and roused the ear of death. 
' Let fools,' he cried ' starve on, while prudent I 
Snug in my nest shall live, and snug shall die.' " 

Good sound eighteenth-century satire this of Dwight's, 
expressing vigorous theologic conservatism, but written, as 
any one can see, in the traditional manner of the early English 
eighteenth century, and published in a year signalised in Eng- 
land by a collected edition of the poems of Burns. American 
literature still lagged behind that of the mother country. 
Dwight also u^rote a poem called "Greenfield Hill," of which 
the name is remembered. It is long, tedious, formal, and 
turgid; but it indicates, like the good President's travels, that 
he was touched by a sense of the beauties of nature in his 
native country. 

Toward the end of the century the literary group of which 
President Dwight is the most memorable figure developed into 
a recognised little company, designated as the " Hartford 
Wits ; " for most of them, though graduates of Yale, lived at 
one time or another in the old capital of colonial Connecticut. 
In Stedman and Hutchinson's " Library of American Litera- 
ture " a special section is given to these " Hartford Wits," of 
whom the chief are said to have been : John Trumbull, Lemuel 
Hopkins, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Theodore Dwight, 
M. F. Cogswell, and E. H. Smith. Of these names only two, 
those of Trumbull and Barlow, now survive even in tradition. 



124 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Trumbull was on the whole the more important. He was 
two years older than President Dwight, and graduated at Yale 
in 1767, two years before him. In 1769 he co-operated with 
him in publishing that series of essays in the manner of the 
"Spectator." From 1771 to 1773 he was a tutor at Yale; 
afterwards he practised law in New Haven and in Boston; and 
in 1 78 1 he went to Hartford, where he remained as lawyer 
and later as Judge of the Superior Court until 18 19. From 
1825 until his death in 1831 he lived at Detroit in Michigan. 
Trumbull's principal works are two long poems in the 
manner of " Hudibras." The first, entitled the " Progress of 
Dulness," and written between 1772 and 1774, satirises the 
state of clerical education in a manner of which the following 
extract will give a sufficient example : — 

*' Our hero's wit and learning now may 
Be proved by token of diploma, 
Of that diploma, which with speed 
He learns to construe and to read; 
And stalks abroad with conscious stride, 
In all the airs of pedant pride, 
With passport signed for wit and knowledge 
And current under seal of college. 
Few months now past, he sees with pain 
His purse as empty as his brain ; 
His father leaves him then to fate. 
And throws him off, as useless weight ; 
But gives him good advice, to teach 
A school at first, and then to preach. 
Thou reason'st well ; it must be so; 
For nothing else thy son can do. 
As thieves of old, t' avoid the halter, 
Took refuge in the holy altar. 
Oft dulness flying from disgrace 
Finds safety in that sacred place ; 
There boldly rears his head, or rests 
Secure from ridicule or jests ; 
Where dreaded satire may not dare 
Offend his wig's extremest hair ; 
Where scripture sanctifies his strains, 
And reverence hides the want of brains." 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA, 1 776-1800 125 

Trumbull's other Hudibrastic work is a mock epic entitled 
" M'Fingal," written between 1774 and 1782, which satirises 
the follies of his countrymen, particularly of the Tory persua- 
sion. The poem had great popularity ; it is said to have 
passed through more than thirty editions. A taste of it may 
be had from the following description of how M'Fingal, a 
caricatured Tory, was punished by a patriot mob for cutting 
down a Liberty pole : — 

" Forthwith the crowd proceed to deck 
With halter'd noose M'Fingal's neck, 
While he in peril of his soul 
Stood tied half -hanging to the pole ; 
Then lifting high the ponderous jar, 
Pour'd o'er his head the smoaking tar. 
With less profusion once was spread 
Oil on the Jewish monarch's head, 
That down his beard and vestments ran, 
And covered all his outward man. 
As when (so Claudian sings) the Gods 
And earth-born Giants fell at odds, 
The stout Enceladus in malice 
Tore mountains up to throw at Pallas; 
And while he held them o'er his head, 
The river, from their fountains fed, 
Pour'd down his back its copious tide, 
And wore its channels in his hide : 
So from the high-raised urn the torrents 
Spread down his side their various currents ; 
His flowing wig, as next the brim, 
First met and drank the sable stream ; 
Adown his visage stern and grave 
RoU'd and adhered the viscid wave ; 
With arms depending as he stood, 
Each cup capacious holds the flood ; 
From nose and chin's remotest end 
The tarry icicles descend ; 
Till all o'erspread, with colors gay. 
He glittered to the western ray, 
Like sleet-bound trees in wintry skies, 
Or Lapland idol carved in ice. 
And now the feather-bag di splay 'd 
Is waved in triumph o'er his head, 



126 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

And clouds him o'er with feathers missive, 

And down upon the tar, adhesive : 

Not Maia's son, with wings for ears, 

Such plumage round his visage wears, 

Nor Milton's six-wing'd angel gathers 

Such superfluity of feathers. 

Now all complete appears our Squire, 

Like Gorgon or Chimaera dire ; 

Nor more could boast on Plato's plan 

To rank among the race of man, 

Or prove his claim to human nature, 

As a two-legg'd unfeather'd creature." 

Now, clearly, this is not " Hudibras," any more than John 
Trumbull, the respectable and scholarly Connecticut lawyer 
of the closing eighteenth century, was Samuel Butler, the pro- 
totype of Grub Street in Restoration London. Most histo- 
rians of American literature who have touched on Trumbull 
have accordingly devoted themselves to emphasising the dif- 
ference between " M'Fingal " and " Hudibras." For our pur- 
poses the likeness between the poems seems more significant. 
Butler died, poor and neglected, in 1680; Trumbull was pros- 
perously alive one hundred and fifty years later; and yet an 
intelligent reader might easily mistake many verses of the latter 
for verses of the former, Trumbull's are less clever, more 
decent, and doubtless distinguishable in various more profound 
ways ; but the two poems are so much alike as to indicate in 
the cleverest American satirist of the closing eighteenth century 
a temper essentially like that of the cleverest English satirist of 
a century before. Butler was born less than ten years after 
Queen Elizabeth died, and Trumbull only ten years before the 
accession of King George III. It is hardly unreasonable to 
find in these facts a fresh indication of \\o^N nearly the 
native temper of America remained like that of the first 
immigration. 

Joel Barlow, the other Hartford Wit vs^ho is still faintly 
remembered, was rather more erratic. He was born in 1754. 
While a Yale undergraduate he served in the Continental 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA, 1 776-1800 127 

Army, in which he was afterward a chaplain, from 1780 to 
1783. In 1786 he became a lawyer at Hartford, where he 
was later the editor of a weekly newspaper; and in 1787 he 
published an epic poem entitled " The Vision of Columbus," 
which by 1807 had been elaborated into "The Columbiad." 
Here is a bit of it : — 

" Based on its rock of Right your empire lies, 
On walls of wisdom let the fabric rise ; 
Preserve your principles, their force unfold, 
Let nations prove them and let kings behold. 
EQUALITY, your first firm-grounded stand; 
Then FREE ELECTION ; then your FEDERAL BAND ; 
This holy Triad should forever shine 
The great compendium of all rights divine, 
Creed of all schools, whence youths by millions draw 
Their themes of right, their decalogues of law; 
Till men shall wonder (in these codes inured) 
How wars were made, how tyrants were endured." 

Even in its first form this turgid epic, which few mortals now 
living have more than glanced at, was the most ambitious 
attempt at serious literature which had appeared in the United 
States. To this day, furthermore, a quarto edition of " The 
Columbiad " is among the most impressive books to look at in 
the world. It brought Barlow political influence. He went 
abroad, first as a sort of business agent, and had something to 
do with politics in both France and England. From 1795 to 
1797 he was United States Consul at Algiers. From 1797 
to 1805 ^^ lived in Paris; from 1805 to 181 1 in Wash- 
ington. In 181 1 he was made United States minister to 
France, in which character he journeyed to meet Napoleon in 
Russia; becoming involved in the retreat from Moscow, he 
died from exhaustion at a Polish village on Christmas Eve, 
1812. 

Though " The Columbiad " was Barlow's most serious 
work, his most agreeable was a comic poem entitled " The 
Hasty Pudding." This, written while he was abroad in 1793, 



128 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

is a humorous lament that Europe lacks a delicacy of the 
table which, with the Atlantic between them, he remembered 
tenderly. A few lines will sufficiently exemplify his rather 
heavy humour : — 

"There is a choice in spoons. Though small appear 
The nice distinction, yet to me 'tis clear, 
The deep bowl'd Gallic spoon, contrived to scoop 
In ample draughts the thin diluted soup, 
Performs not well in those substantial things, 
Whose mass adhesive to the metal clings ; 
Where the strong labial muscles must embrace, 
The gentle curve and sweep the hollow space. 
With ease to enter and discharge the freight, 
A bowl less concave, but still more dilate, 
Becomes the pudding best. The shape, the size, 
A secret rests, unknown to vulgar eyes. 
Experienced feeders can alone impart 
A rule so much above the lore of art. 
These tuneful lips that thousand spoons have tried. 
With just precision could the point decide. 
Though not in song ; the muse but poorly shines 
In cones, in cubes, and geometric lines ; 
Yet the true form, as near as she can tell, 
Is that small section of a goose egg shell. 
Which in two equal portions shall divide 
The distance from the centre to the side. 
Fear not to slaver ; 't is no deadly sin : — 
Like the free Frenchman, from your joyous chin 
Suspend the ready napkin; or like me. 
Poise with one hand your bowl upon your knee ; 
Just in the zenith your wise head project. 
Your full spoon, rising in a line direct. 
Bold as a bucket, heed no drops that fall, 
The wide mouth'd bowl will surely catch them all ! " 

Such was Barlow at his best. The other Hartford Wits 
may be judged by an extract from " The Political Green- 
house," written by Alsop, Theodore Dwight, and Hopkins, 
in 1799; they apostrophised Bonaparte as follows : — 

" Ambitious Chief ! in dust laid low, 
Behold the honours of thy brow, 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA, 1 776-1 800 129 

The laurels culled on Egypt's shore 
Shall wither ere the day be o'er; 
Thy armies thinned, reduced thy force, 
Fell ruin waits thine onward course, 
While of thy country's aid bereft. 
No safety but in flight is left, 
And victory's self but seals thy doom, 
And brings thee nearer to the tomb. 
I see destruction wing her way, 
I see the eagles mark their prey. 
Where pent in Cairo's putrid wall, 
In heaps thy dying soldiers fall; 
Or, mid the desert's burning waste. 
Smote by the Samiel's fiery blast; 
Or pressed by fierce Arabian bands, 
With thirst they perish on the sands. 
While Bonaparte's dreaded name 
Shall shine a beacon's warning flame, 
To point to times of future date 
Unprincipled ambition's fate." 



Certainly prophetic of what twelve or fifteen years later 
befell Napoleon, who at this time was just beginning his 
imperial career, this extract, together with those which we 
have considered from Dwight, Trumbull, and Barlow, may 
suffice to exemplify the first literary efflorescence of our 
country ; and a good Harvard man, not free from some of the 
prejudices which are the price of a Harvard education, lately 
remarked in speaking of the Hartford Wits that they repre- 
sent the only considerable efflorescence of Yale. Perhaps 
they do ; and very clearly they contribute nothing memorable 
to the wisdom of the eternities. The answer which was made 
to that complacent Harvard man is nevertheless true : at 
the time when the Hartford Wits wrote, no Harvard man had 
produced literature half so good as theirs. They made an 
intensely spirited effort, serious in purpose even if sometimes 
light in form, to create in our new country a literature which 
should assert national independence as surely as that indepen- 
dence had been asserted in politics. The result was patriotic, 

9 



ISO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

it was not without humour, it had all sorts of qualities of 
which one may speak respectfully ; and they did their very 
best. This best, however, proved thoroughly imitative, and at 
the same time full of indications that its writers lacked that 
peculiar fusion of thought and feeling which made English 
character in the eighteenth century such as could fitly be ex- 
pressed by the kind of literature which the Hartford Wits 
so courageously attempted. An heroic, patriotic effort they 
stand for, and one made with enthusiasm, wit, and courage. 
Nobody can fairly hold them to blame for the fact that their 
America still lacked national experience ripe for expression in 
a form which should be distinctive. 

Contemporary with the Hartford Wits was a much less 
eminent man, until lately almost forgotten, whose memory is 
now beginning to revive. In one or two of his poems, it now 
seems probable, we can find more literary merit than in any 
other work produced in America before the nineteenth century. 
His name was Philip Freneau. Of French-Huguenot descent, 
the son of a New York wine merchant, he was born in that 
city on the 2d of January, 1752. He was educated at 
Princeton, and having taken to the sea, was captured by the 
British during the Revolution and passed some time on a 
prison ship near New York. After the Revolution he resumed 
his mercantile career. In 1791 he became the editor of a very 
radical newspaper in Philadelphia. In 1798 he took to the 
sea again ; and the rest of his life has no significance for us. 
He died in New Jersey in 1832. 

Freneau was a man of strong feeling, ardently in sympathy 
with the Revolution, and intensely democratic. As a journal- 
ist, then, he was a sharp and bitter opponent of any attempt 
on the part either of England or of the more prudent class in 
his own country to assert authority ; and a considerable part 
of his poetry, of which he supervised at least four separate 
editions between 1786 and 18 15, consists of rather reckless 
satire, not conspicuously better or worse than much other 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA, 1 776-1800 131 

satire of the period. Our bare outline of his life, however, 
which omits many details, — for one thing, he resided for a 
while in the West Indies, where he was much stirred by the 
horrors of slavery, — indicates one characteristic fact. The 
son of a New York man of business, educated at a thor- 
oughly respectable college, he became both a practical sailor 
and a journalist. Now, in George III.'s England a man who 
was either scholar, sailor, or journalist was apt to be nothing 
else ; but in America to this day such a career as Freneau's 
remains far from unusual. Far from unusual, too, it would 
have been in the England of Queen Elizabeth, — of which 
probably the most typical personage was Walter Ralegh, sol- 
dier, sailor, statesman, adventurer, chemist, historian, coloniser, 
poet, and a dozen things else. Ralegh's career was one of 
unsurpassed magnificence ; Freneau's in comparison seems 
petty. In both, however, one can see the common fact that 
a man whose life was intensely and variously busy found him- 
self instinctively stirred to poetic expression. 

The greater part of Freneau's poetry, to be sure, was 
occasional. On his satires we have touched already. Here 
is an example of his patriotic verse : — 

" At Eutaw Springs the valiant died : 

Their limbs with dust are covered o'er ; 
Weep on, ye springs, your tearful tide ; 
How many heroes are no more ! 

Here is another, from a poem " On Barney's Victory over 
the Ship ' General Monk ' " : — 

" Lo ! I see their van appearing — 

Back our top-sails to the mast ! 
They toward us full are steering 

With a gentle western blast : 
I 've a list of all their cargoes. 

All their guns, and all their men : 
I am sure these modern Argo's 

Can't escape us one in ten : 



132 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

" Yonder comes the Charming Sally 

Sailing with the General Greene — 
First we '11 fight the Hyder Ally, 

Taking her is taking them : 
She intends to give us battle, 

Bearing down with all her sail — 
Now, boys, let our cannon rattle ! 

To take her we cannot fail." 

However interesting such verse may be historically, it is not 
of the kind which rises above the dust of the centuries. Now 
and then, however, Freneau struck a note different from this, 
and diiFerent on the whole from any which had previously been 
sounded in America. His most generally recognised poem 
is that on " The Indian Burying-Ground," to which atten- 
tion has been called by the fact that Thomas Campbell, in 
" O'Connor's Child," stole one of its lines. Campbell's 
verse runs as follows : — 

" Bright as the bow that spans the storm, 

In Erin's vesture clad, 
A son of light, a lovely form, 

He comes and makes her glad. 
Now on the grass-green turf he sits. 

His tasselled horn beside him laid ; 
Now o'er the hills in chase he flits — 

The hunter and the deer — a shade." 

Freneau's poem is worth quoting in full : — 

" In spite of all the learned have said, 
I still my old opinion keep ; 
The posture that we give the dead 
Points out the soul's eternal sleep. 

" Not so the ancients of these lands ; — 
The Indian, when from life released, 
Again is seated with his friends, 
And shares again the joyous feast. 

" His imaged birds, and painted bowl. 
And venison, for a journey dressed, 
Bespeak the nature of the soul. 
Activity, that wants no rest. 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA, 1776^1800 133 

" His bow for action ready bent, 

And arrows, with a head of stone, 
Can only mean that life is spent, 
And not the old ideas gone. 

" Thou, stranger, that shalt come this way, 
No fraud upon the dead commit, — 
Observe the swelling turf, and say. 
They do not lie, but here they sit. 

" Here still a lofty rock remains, 

On which the curious eye may trace 
(Now wasted half by wearing rains) 
The fancies of a ruder race. 

" Here still an aged elm aspires, 

Beneath whose far projecting shade 
(And which the shepherd still admires) 
The children of the forest played. 

" There oft a restless Indian queen 
(Pale Shebah with her braided hair) 
And many a barbarous form is seen 
To chide the man that lingers there. 

" By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, 
In habit for the chase arrayed. 
The hunter still the deer pursues, 
The hunter and the deer — a shade ! 

"And long shall timorous Fancy see 
The painted chief and pointed spear. 
And Reason's self shall bow the knee 
To shadows and delusions here." 

In the genuineness and simplicity of these verses, there is 
true beauty. In the opening thought, that it were better for 
the alert dead to sit than to lie drowsing, — that Hie sedet were 
a better epitaph than Hie jacet^ — there is something really im- 
aginative. And in the pensive melancholy with which Freneau 
records the rock-tracings of the vanished natives of America, 



134 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

there is likeness to the motive of a poem which twelve years 
before Freneau died permanently enriched English literature. 
This is John Keats's " Ode to a Grecian Urn," published 
in 1820 : — 

" Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard 

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; 
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, 

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone : 
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave 

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare ; 
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss. 

Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve; 
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, 

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair ! " 

Here, of course, is no such plagiarism as that of Campbell, 
who stole a whole line of Freneau's ; no such plagiarism, 
either, as that of Sir Walter Scott, who stole another ; nor 
yet such as that still more unprincipled one which Professor 
Tyler records, where an English lady printed as her own a 
poem of Freneau in full. It may fairly be doubted whether 
Keats ever saw a line of Freneau's, or ever heard his name. 
The contrast between Freneau's " Indian Burying-Ground " 
and Keats's " Grecian Urn " is worth our attention only be- 
cause both poets had a similar motive. Freneau expressed it 
simply, directly, and even beautifully ; Keats expressed it im- 
mortally. The contrast is one between good literature and 
great, between the very best that America had produced in 
the closing years of the eighteenth century and one of the 
many excellent things which England produced during the 
first twenty years of the century that followed. Taken by 
itself, " The Indian Burying-Ground " may fairly excite our 
patriotic enthusiasm to an excessive degree ; a comparison 
with the " Grecian Urn " may recall our patriotism to the 
limits of common-sense. 

The literature produced in this country between the out- 
break of the American Revolution and the close of the 



LITERATURE IN AMERICA, 1776-1800 135 

eighteenth century may fairly be typified, if not precisely sum- 
marised, by what we have glanced at, — the writings of those 
orators and public men who reached their highest expression 
in the " Federalist," the conscious and imitative effort of the 
Hartford Wits, and the sporadic poetry of Philip Freneau. 



IX 



SUMMARY 

We have now glanced at the literary history of America 
during the first two centuries of American existence. In the 
seventeenth century, the century of immigration, when Ameri- 
cans felt themselves truly to be emigrant Englishmen, they ex- 
pressed themselves only in such theological and historical 
work as may be typified by the " Magnalia " of Cotton Mather. 
During the eighteenth century, the century of independence, 
when Americans felt themselves still Englishmen, but with 
no personal ties to England, America produced in literature a 
theology which ran to metaphysical extremes, such vigorous 
common sense as one finds in the varied works of Franklin, 
and such writings as we have glanced at since. These two 
centuries added to English literature the names of Shakspere, 
Milton, Dryden, Swift, Addison, Pope, Johnson, and Burns. 
To match these names in America we can find none more 
eminent than those of Cotton Mather, Edwards, Franklin, 
the writers of the " Federalist," the Hartford Wits, and 
Freneau. As we have seen, the history of England during 
these two centuries was that of a steadily developing and in- 
creasing national experience. In comparison, the history of 
America reveals national inexperience. There is no need for 
further emphasis on the commonplace that lack of experience 
does not favour literary or artistic expression. 



BOOK III 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 



BOOK III 

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

I 

ENGLISH HISTORY SINCE 180O 

In 1800 King George III., who had been forty years on the 
throne, was lapsing into that melancholy madness in which his 
sixty years of royalty closed. The last ten years of his reign 
were virtually part of his successor's, the Prince Regent, 
afterward George IV. In 1830 King William IV. succeeded 
his brother; his reign lasted only seven years. Since 1837 the 
sovereign of England has been Queen Victoria. During the 
nineteenth century, then, only three English sovereigns came 
to the throne. It chances that each of these represents a dis- 
tinct phase of English history. 

The Regency, under which general name we may for the 
moment include also the reign of George IV., was the time 
when the insular isolation of England was most pronounced. 
In 1798 Nelson won the battle of the Nile. No incident 
more definitely marks the international position of England 
as the chief conservative defender of such traditions as for a 
while seemed fatally threatened by the French Revolution 
becoming incarnate in Napoleon. During the first fifteen 
years of the nineteenth century the conflict persisted, more 
and more isolating England and emphasising English con- 
servatism. In 1805, Trafalgar, which finally destroyed the 
sea power of Napoleon, made the English Channel more than 
ever a frontier separating England from the rest of Europe. 



I40 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

It was not until ten years later, in 1815, that Waterloo, 
finally overthrowing Napoleon, made room for the reaction 
which overran continental Europe for thirty years to come; 
and only then could England begin to relax that insularity 
which the Napoleonic wars had so developed in English 
temper. England is the only country of civilised Europe 
where Napoleon never succeeded in planting his power; only 
English soil remained free from his invasion; and during the 
first part of the nineteenth century the price which England 
paid for this freedom was an unprecedented concentration of 
her own life within her own bounds. This era of dogged 
resistance to the French Revolution finally developed the 
traditional type of John Bull. 

To suppose that England remained unmoved by revolu- 
tionary fervour, however, would be a complete mistake. Two 
years after William IV. ascended the throne, there occurred 
in English politics an incident as revolutionary as any which 
ever took place in France. The results of it have long since 
altered the whole nature of English life, social and political. 
Although revolutionary in purpose, however, and in ultimate 
effect rather more successfully revolutionary than any convul- 
sion of continental Europe, the Reform Bill of 1832 was 
carried through in England by formally constitutional means. 
This Bill permanently altered the theory and practice of 
suffrage in England, establishing the broadly democratic prin- 
ciple that representation in the House of Commons shall be 
apportioned to the population. To the conservative temper 
of the time nothing could have been more abhorrent than 
parliamentary reform. The fact that under the old system 
the House of Commons had worked admirably seemed reason 
enough why there should be no change ; the principles on 
which reform was urged involved something like recognition 
of those abstract rights which even to the present day remain 
foreign to the most characteristic temper of England. Un- 
doubtedly the consequent opposition of the better classes was 



ENGLISH HISTORY 141 

blindly prejudiced. The reformed Parliaments, newly re- 
formed more than once since 1832, have worked far better 
than the opponents of reform expected; but in the minds of 
many competent judges it is still an open question whether as 
agents of government they have worked so well as the Parlia- 
ments which came before. The old system, where a great 
gentleman often carried half a dozen boroughs in his pocket, 
made it easy to find a seat in the House for any young man 
of promise ; to go no further, it was to this system that we 
owe the parliamentary career of Burke. There can be little 
doubt that with the progress of democratic temper in England 
the House of Commons has tended personally to deteriorate. 
No doubt there are aspects in which the new system seems 
more just than the old ; but there are aspects, too, in which 
the old seems to have been the safer. Such speculations as 
this, however, are fruitless; the Reform Bill is a fact; and the 
thing for us to remark about it is that this virtual revolution 
in England was accomplished constitutionally. In brief, what 
happened was this. The House of Lords, the more conser- 
vative chamber of Parliament, was unprepared to pass the 
Reform Bill ; the House of Commons, representing, it believed, 
the ardent conviction of the country, was determined that the 
Bill should be passed. Thereupon the King was persuaded 
to inform the Lords that in case they persisted in voting 
against the measure he should create new peers enough to 
make a majority of the House. This threat brought the con- 
servative peers to terms. They did not vote for the measure, 
but under the leadership of the Duke of Wellington they 
walked out of the house in silent protest, A revolutionary 
threat on the part of the King had accomplished under consti- 
tutional forms a peaceful revolution. 

Five years later King William IV. was dead. Then began 
the reign of the most tenderly human sovereign in English 
history. For sixty-two years, in the full blaze of public life, 
she has unfalteringly done what she has deemed her duty. 



142 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

This devoted conscientiousness has strengthened English roy- 
alty beyond words. Through sixty years of growing democracy 
the fact that the throne of England has been filled by Queen 
Victoria has gone far to re-establish in popular esteem a form 
of government which it is the fashion to call a thing of the 
past. 

In general this Victorian era has been peaceful, but still 
one which is best typified by the newest title of its sovereign. 
For during the last sixty years of the nineteenth century Eng- 
land has been quietly asserting itself no longer as an isolated 
kingdom, but as a world-empire. This imperialism of Eng- 
land seems different from any other which has declared itself 
since the pristine empire of Rome. It stands not for the as- 
sertion of central and despotic authority, but rather for the 
maintenance of those legal traditions which evince the elas- 
ticity of still unbroken vitality. For, speaking broadly, the 
English Common Law is a system, not of rules, but of prin- 
ciples. Its fundamental notion is that the world should be 
governed by established custom. So long as its influence was 
confined to the island where it was developed, to be sure, it 
still seemed impracticably rigid. The American Revolution, 
however, taught England a lesson which has been thoroughly 
learned, — that when English authority asserts itself in foreign 
regions, the true spirit of the Common Law should recognise 
and maintain all local customs which do not conflict with 
public good. In India, for example, local custom sanctioned 
many things essentially abominable, — murder, self-immolation, 
and the like. Such crimes against civilisation the English 
power has condemned and repressed. Harmless local custom, 
on the other hand, — freedom of worship, peculiarities of land 
tenure, and whatever harmonises with public order, — the 
English government has maintained as strenuously as in Eng- 
land itself it has maintained the customs peculiar to the 
mother country. So in Canada it has maintained a hundred 
forms of old French law ancestral to those provinces. So in 



ENGLISH HISTORY 143 

Australia it has maintained many new systems and customs 
which have grown up in a colony settled since the American 
Revolution. Its modern state is typified by the fact that in 
the judicial committee of the Privy Council — whose functions 
resemble those of the Supreme Court of the United States — 
there are now regularly members from Canada, from India, 
from Australia, to pronounce in this court of appeal on ques- 
tions referred to the mother country from parts of the empire 
where the actual law differs from that of England herself. 

The Victorian epoch, then, has begun to explain the true 
spirit of the English law : whatever the letter, this spirit main- 
tains that throughout the empire, and all the places where the 
imperial influence extends, the whole force of England shall 
sustain the differing rights and traditions which have proved 
themselves, for the regions where they have grown, sound, 
safe, and favourable to civilised prosperity. The growing 
flexibility of English government has tended to make domi- 
nant in many parts of the world the language and the ideals 
which we share with England. The progress of imperial 
England, then, frequently misrepresented, as though it were 
mere selfish aggression, is really a phase of a world-conflict 
which the acceleration of intercommunication — steam travel 
and the electric telegraph — has at last made inevitable. Be- 
yond doubt war is terrible ; one of our own generals in the 
Civil War is said to have declared that " War is Hell." 
At least to the traditional American mind, however, hell 
hardly yet presents itself as a thing which unaided human 
ingenuity can certainly avoid ; and when war means that the 
progress of the moral, legal, and political ideals which we 
share with England either must be checked or must domi- 
nate by armed force, minds loyal to our ancestral traditions 
may fairly begin to question whether tame peace is not worse 
still. 

Historically, then, England began the century as an isolated 
conservative power. In the reign of King William IV. it 



144 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

underwent a revolution which its ancestral legal forms proved 
strong and flexible enough to accomplish without convulsion 
or bloodshed ; and during the long reign of Queen Victoria 
it has been more and more widely asserting the imperial 
dominion of the flexibly vital traditions of our Common 
Law. 



II 

ENGLISH LITERATURE SINCE 180O 

So we come to the literature of England during the nineteenth 
century. By chance several dates which we have named for 
other purposes are significant in literary history as well as in 
political. In 1798, when Nelson fought the battle of the 
Nile, Wordsworth and Coleridge published their famous vol- 
ume of " Lyrical Ballads." This little book is commonly 
regarded as the first important expression of that romantic 
outburst of poetry which substituted for the formal literary 
traditions of the eighteenth century those traditions of individ- 
ual artistic freedom which have persisted until the present time. 
In brief, the literary emancipation of England, amid blind 
political conservatism, was almost as marked as the literary 
conservatism of France, amid revolutionary political changes. 
The spirit of revolution was everywhere abroad ; but in Eng- 
land it more profoundly influenced phrase than conduct, while 
in France the case was just the reverse. In 1832, the year 
of the Reform Bill, Scott died ; Byron, Shelley, and Keats 
were already dead ; so was Miss Austen ; and every literary 
reputation contemporary with theirs was finally established. 

Broadly speaking, the period of English literature which 
began with the " Lyrical Ballads " and ended with the death 
of Scott may be divided at 18 15, the year of Waterloo. The 
chief expression which preceded this was a passionate outburst 
of romantic poetry, maintaining in widely various forms the 
revolutionary principle that the individual, freed from acciden- 
tal and conventional trammels, may be trusted to tend toward 
righteousness ; that human nature is not essentially evil but 
excellent ; and that sin, evil, and pain are brought into being 

, !0 



146 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

by those distortions of such human nature which are wrought 
by hampering, outworn custom and superstition. Though this 
philosophy may never have been precisely or fully set forth 
by any one of the English poets who flourished between 
1800 and 18 1 5, it pervades the work of all; and this work 
taken together is the most memorable body of poetry in our 
language, except the Elizabethan. So far as one can now tell, 
this school distinguishes itself from the Elizabethan, and from 
almost any other of equal merit in literary history, by the 
eclectic variety of its individual members ; their passionate 
devotion to the ideal of freedom in both thought and phrase 
made these new poets differ from one another almost as con- 
spicuously as the poets of the eighteenth century were alike. 
For all this, as one reads them now, a trait common through- 
out their work grows salient. Despite the fervour of their 
revolutionary individualism, Wordsworth and Coleridge and 
Byron and Shelley and the rest agreed in eagerly looking for- 
ward to an enfranchised future in which this world was to be 
incalculably better and nobler than in the tyrant-ridden past. 
This was the dominant sentiment of English literature from 
the battle of the Nile to that of Waterloo. 

Between Waterloo and the Reform Bill, which was passed 
in the year when Scott died, a new phase of feeling dominated 
the literature of England. Though something of this elder 
spirit of hope lingered, the most considerable fact was the 
publication of all but the first two of the Waverley Novels. 
The contrast between these and the preceding poetry is strongly 
marked. What gave them popularity and has assured them 
permanence is the fervour with which they retrospectively as- 
sert the beauty of ideals which even in their own time had 
almost vanished. If the first outburst of English literature in 
the nineteenth century was a poetry animated by aspiration 
toward an ideal future, the second period of that literature, 
embodied in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, dwelt in carelessly 
dignified prose on the nobler aspects of a real past. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 147 

These two phases of English literature roughly correspond 
with the Regency and the reign of William IV. The litera- 
ture which has ensued will probably be known to the future 
as Victorian ; and it is still too near us for any confident 
generalisation. But although there has been admirable Vic- 
torian poetry, of which the most eminent makers seem to 
have been Tennyson and the Brownings ; and although in its 
own time serious Victorian prose, of which perhaps the most 
eminent makers were Ruskin and Carlyle, has seemed of 
paramount interest, — there is probability that posterity may 
find the most characteristic feature of Victorian literature to 
have been that school of fiction which brought the English 
novel to a point of development comparable with that of the 
Elizabethan drama. It is almost literally to the reign of 
Oueen Victoria that we owe the work of Dickens, Thack- 
eray, George Eliot, and the numberless lesser novelists and 
story-tellers whose work has been the chief reading of the 
English-speaking world, down to the days of Stevenson and 
Rudyard Kipling. 

The first and the most widely popular of Victorian novel- 
ists was Dickens, whose work began less than five years 
after Scott's ended. The contrast between them is among 
the most instructive in literary history. Scott's ideal was al- 
ways that of a gentleman ; Dickens's, with equal instinctive 
honesty of feeling, was that of the small trading classes. 
Whatever merits Dickens had, and these were great and 
lasting, he fatally lacked one grace which up to his time the 
literature of his country had generally preserved, — that of 
distinction. The other novelists who soon arose differed 
from Dickens in many ways, often possessing a sense of fact 
far more true than his, and sympathies more various. At 
least in their comparative lack of distinction, however, they 
have been more like him than like the men of letters of any 
preceding period. They have generally dealt, too, with mat- 
ters of nearly contemporary fact. In brief, the dominant note 



148 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

of Victorian fiction, which is probably the dominant fact of 
Victorian literature, is a note of triumphant democracy. 

Broadly speaking, then, we may say that up to the time of 
the Reform Bill the English literature of the nineteenth cen- 
tury expressed itself first in that body of aspiring poetry which 
seems the most memorable English utterance since Eliza- 
bethan times, and secondly in those novels of Sir Walter Scott, 
which, dealing romantically with the past, indicate the accom- 
plishment of a world revolution ; and that since the Reform 
Bill decidedly the most popular phase of English literature has 
been prose fiction dealing with contemporary life. It is be- 
yond our purpose to emphasise the growth of science mean- 
while, a growth which has corresponded with such material 
changes as are typified by the use of steam and electricity. 
But many now think that in time to come the most lasting 
name of the Victorian epoch will, after all, be that of Charles 
Darwin. 

Slight as this sketch of English literature in the nineteenth 
century has been, it is sufficient for our purpose, which is 
only to remind ourselves of what occurred in England during 
the century when something which we may fairly call litera- 
ture developed in America. 



Ill 

AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 18OO 

Mr. Henry Adams shows how amid the constant growth of 
democracy, amid practical assertion of the power which re- 
sides in the uneducated classes, and which our Constitution 
made conscious, our national life began with bewildering con- 
fusion. To the better classes, embodied in the old Federalist 
party, this seemed anarchical; the election of Mr. Jefferson 
they honestly believed to portend the final overthrow of law 
and order. Instead of that, one can see now, it really started 
our permanent progress. Among the early incidents of this 
progress was the purchase of Louisiana, which finally estab- 
lished the fact that the United States were to dominate the 
North American continent. So complete, indeed, has our 
occupation of this continent become that it is hard to remem- 
ber how in 1800 the United States, at least so far as thev 
were settled, were almost comprised between the Alleghanies 
and the Atlantic. In less than one hundred years we have 
colonised, and to a considerable degree civilised, the vast 
territory now under our undisputed control ; and the fact that 
the regions which we have colonised have chanced to be con- 
tiguous to the regions which were first under our sovereignty 
has only concealed without altering the truth that the United 
States have proved themselves the most successful colonising 
power in modern history .^ 

Our colonial growth, or expansion, — call it what you will, 
— began with the purchase of Louisiana. Nine years later, 

1 See an article by Mr. A. Lawrence Lowell in the "Atlantic" for Feb- 
ruary, 1899. 



ISO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

under President Madison, came that second war with England 
which, while unimportant in English history, was very import- 
ant in ours. The War of 1812 asserted our independent 
nationality, our ability to maintain ourselves against a foreign 
enemy, and, above all, our fighting power on the sea, of which 
fresh evidence was given during the brief but crucial war with 
Spain in 1898. The War of 18 12, besides, the only foreign 
war in our history except this recent Spanish one, did much 
to revive and strengthen the Revolutionary conviction of our 
essential alienation from England. Before that war broke 
out there were times when it seemed almost as likely to arise 
with France. It was an incident, we can now see, of that 
death-grapple wherein England was maintaining against con- 
tinental Europe incarnate in Napoleon those traditions of Com- 
mon Law which we share with her, America had felt the 
arbitrary insolence of Napoleon, as well as that of England ; 
neutrality proved impossible. We chanced to take the French 
side. Thereby, whatever we gained, — and surely our strength- 
ened national integrity is no small blessing, — we certainly 
emphasised and prolonged that misunderstanding with the 
mother country which still keeps disunited the two peoples 
who preserve the Common Law. 

The next critical fact in our history was the assertion in 
1823 of the Monroe Doctrine, In brief, this declares that 
the American continent is no longer a region where foreign 
powers may freely colonise ; that from the Arctic Ocean to 
Cape Horn American soil is as fully controlled by established 
governments as is Europe itself; that the chief political 
power in America is the United States ; and that any attempt 
on the part of a foreign power to establish colonies in Amer- 
ica, or to interfere with the governments already established 
there, will be regarded by the United States as an unfriendly 
act. This virtual declaration of imperial dominance in a 
whole hemisphere has generally been respected. Except for 
the transitory empire of Maximilian in Mexico, established 



AMERICAN HISTORY 151 

during the most troublous period of our Civil War by that 
filibustering French emperor who deliberately embodied con- 
tinental as distinguished from English ideals, the integrity of 
the American continent has remained unthreatened since 
President Monroe's famous message. 

During the next thirty-five years developed that inevitable 
national disunion which culminated in the Civil War of 1861. 
The economic and social systems of North and of South were 
radically different: generation by generation they naturally 
bred men less and less able to understand each other. As we 
shall see later, the Southern temper lagged behind the Northern 
somewhat as for two centuries the native temper of America 
lagged behind that of England. The Southerners of the fifties 
were far more like their revolutionary ancestors than were the 
Northerners. General Washington and General Lee, for ex- 
ample, have many more points of resemblance than have 
President Washington and President Lincoln ; and Lee was 
really as typically Southern in his time as Lincoln in those 
same days was typically Northern. The Civil War involved 
deep moral questions, concerning the institution of slavery 
and national union ; but at last we can begin to see that it 
was a moral struggle on both sides. So the generation now 
in its prime, to whom the Civil War is a matter not of expe- 
rience but of history, is coming to understand that what ulti- 
mately makes it so superbly heroic a tradition is the fact that 
on both sides men ardently gave their lives for what they 
believed to be the truth. The conflict was truly irrepressible ; 
social and economic conditions had developed the different 
parts of our country in ways so different that nothing but 
force could prevent disunion. 

Disunion did not ensue. Instead of it, after a troubled 
interval, has come a union constantly stronger. Our history 
since the Civil War is too recent for confident generalisation. 
Two or three of its features, however, are growing salient. 
Long before the Civil War certain phases of material pros- 



152 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

perity had begun tp develop in this country,— the great cott6n- 
growing of the South, for one thing, and for another, the 
manufactures of New England. Since the Civil War some 
similar economic facts have produced marked changes in our 
national equilibrium. One has been the opening of the great 
lines of transcontinental railway. Along with these has de- 
veloped the enormous growth of bread-stuffs throughout the 
West, together with incalculable increase of our mineral 
wealth. These causes have effected the complete settlement 
of our national territory. At the close of the Civil War a 
great part of the country between the Mississippi and Cali- 
fornia remained virtually unappropriated. At present almost 
every available acre of it is in private ownership. The Span- 
ish War of 1898, then, indicates something more than the 
political accidents or intrigues which superficially seemed to 
cause it. Just as truly as the Revolution or the Civil War, 
the Spanish War probably marked a critical fact in American 
history. Our continent is finally settled. Such freedom as 
our more adventurous spirits used to find in going West they 
must now find, if at all, in emigrating, like our English 
cousins, to regions not politically under our control. There 
they must face a serious question. Shall they submit them- 
selves, in the regions where their active lives must pass, to 
legal and political systems foreign to their own ; or shall they 
assert in those regions the legal and political principles which, 
for all the superficial materialism of their lives, the fact of 
their ancestral language makes them believe ideal? There 
is an aspect, which future years may prove profoundly true, 
wherein what we call imperialism seems a blundering awaken- 
ing to the consciousness that if our language and our law 
are to survive, they must survive by unwelcome force of 
conquest. 

So for the first time since the settlement of Virginia and 
New England we come to a point where the history of Eng- 
land and that of America assume similar aspects. For nearly 



AMERICAN HISTORY 153 

three centuries the national experience of England and the 
national inexperience of America have tended steadily to 
diverge. Our inexperience is fast fading. At the close of 
our first century of independent existence we find ourselves 
as a nation unexpectedly and regretfully face to face with the 
question which during the reign of her present Majesty has 
been the most important before the mother country. The 
growth of population during the nineteenth century, the in- 
credible improvement of intercommunication by steam and 
electricity, and the immense consequent development of trade, 
are placing before us an unavoidable dilemma. Shall our 
language, with its ideals of law and of conduct, dominate ; 
or shall it recede and yield to others ? This same question 
presses on England, too. In this final historical fact of com- 
mon experience there appears some chance of such future 
union of our ancestral language and ideals as the disuniting 
influence of three hundred years long placed almost beyond 
the range of hope. 



IV 

LITERATURE IN AMERICA SINCE 180O 

It is only during this nineteenth century, as we have seen, 
that literature in America has advanced to a point where it 
deserves detached study. By chance its various phases, 
though not exactly like those of contemporary English lit- 
erature, fall into chronologic groups very like those which we 
noted in the literature of the mother country. During the first 
thirty years of this century the chief development of literature 
in America took place in the Middle States, centring — as the 
life of the Middle States tended more and more to centre — 
in the city of New York. The literary prominence of this 
region roughly corresponds with those years between 1798 
and 1832 which produced the poets of the Regency and 
the " Waverley Novels." Meanwhile, as we shall see later. 
New England, which for a century past had been less con- 
spicuous in American intellectual life than at the beginning, 
was gathering the strength which finally expressed itself in 
the most important literature hitherto produced in our country. 
Broadly speaking, this literature, was contemporary with the 
Victorian. In 1837, when her Majesty came to the throne, 
it was hardly in existence; before 1881, when George Eliot, 
the third of the great Victorian novelists, died, it was virtually 
complete. To-day it may be regarded as a thing of the past. 
What has succeeded it is too recent for historical treatment ; 
at this we shall only glance. For in a study like ours to dis- 
cuss living men seems more and more to be as far from wis- 
dom as to sensitive temper it must seem from decency. In 
the chapters to come, then, we shall consider these three 
literary epochs in turn : first, the prominence of the Middle 
States ; next, the Renaissance of New England j and, finally, 
what has followed. 



BOOK IV 

LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE 
STATES FROM 1798 to 1857 



BOOK IV 

LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE STATES 
FROM 1798 to 1857 



CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN 

During the last quarter of the eighteenth century the Hart- 
ford Wits were far from alone in their vigorously patriotic 
effort to create a national literature for America. A glance 
through the pages of Stedman and Hutchinson's " Library of 
American Literature " will show how considerable in quan- 
tity, though not in quality, was the fruitless literary activity 
of the period. Decidedly before 1800 a great many Ameri- 
cans were trying to write, and were founding on all sides 
newspapers, magazines, reviews, and the like, usually ephem- 
eral. The numerous printing-presses which thus came 
into existence began meantime to place at public disposal, 
for surprisingly low prices, the masterpieces of that English 
literature which our patriotic men of letters were endeavour- 
ing to emulate or to surpass. In New York, a little later, 
appeared an admirably printed series of British Classics in 
something like a hundred volumes ; and a characteristic ex- 
ample of what occupied the leisure of country printers, whose 
chief business was to produce weekly newspapers, may be 
found in a pretty little pocket edition of Boswell's " Life of 
Johnson," printed in 1824 ^^ Bellows Falls, Vermont. 

Among other abortive phases of literary activity during the 
period of the Hartford Wits, was an effort to create a native 
American drama. In fact, up to the present time, the Ameri- 



158 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1 798-185 j 

can theatre has produced no more permanent work than that 
of John Howard Payne, who is remembered only as the 
author of " Home, Sweet Home," a song from an otherwise 
forgotten opera. In hfe, however, Payne was not a sohtary 
figure ; he belonged to the later period of that school of 
American theatrical writing whose chief founder is sometimes 
said to have been William Dunlap. Of late years the Dunlap 
Society of New York has revived his name and has tried to 
revive his plays. This pious act has succeeded only in justi- 
fying the oblivion which long ago overtook writer and work 
alike. Yet in the course of Dunlap's literary career he pro- 
duced one book worth our attention. The man himself, son 
of an Irish ofiicer who had settled in New Jersey after the 
capture of Quebec, was a person whose general character 
may be inferred from the fact that, having lost the sight of 
his right eye, he devoted himself to the art of painting, in 
which he so far succeeded as to become a founder of the 
National Academy of Design. His career as artist and 
dramatist was at its height in New York at the beginning of 
the nineteenth century. The work which makes him worth 
our momentary attention came a little later; it is his two- 
volume book, published in 18 15, which remains the principal 
authority concerning the life of Charles Brockden Brown. 

Dunlap's Life of Brown is unintentionally comic. It runs 
through its two long volumes with never a chapter from 
beginning to end ; it has neither table of contents nor index ; 
and the diffuse pomposity of its style may be inferred from the 
sentence with which, after above two pages of generalities, he 
finally attacks his subject : — 

" Brown is one of those names which belongs to so great a portion 
of those who descend from English parentage that it ceases to identify 
an individual. Brockden is a happy addition which was derived from 
a distant relation." 

Incidentally Dunlap introduces such copious extracts from 
Brown's writings, and in so confused a way, that except as a 



BROCKDEN BROWN 159 

matter of style you would often be at a loss to know which of 
the two you were reading. His temper, too, is as far from 
critical as that of the Mr. Weems who gave us the story of 
Washington and the cherry-tree. For all its faults, however, 
Dunlap's book is honestly admiring, affectionately sympathetic, 
and artless enough to produce, along with exasperating 
bewilderment, a growing sense of the artistic and literary en- 
vironment from which our first professional man of letters 
emerged. 

For Brockden Brown, though for years almost forgotten, 
was really so memorable that in 1834, when Jared Sparks 
began his " Library of American Biography," a Life of Brown 
by Prescott, the future historian, deservedly appeared in the 
first volume. Charles Brockden Brown was born in Phila- 
delphia, of respectable Quaker parentage, on January 17, 
1 77 1. For a while he studied law; but, finding himself 
irresistibly interested in literature, he turned to letters as a 
means of support at the age of about twenty-five. Before 
1796 he had contributed essays to the " Columbus Magazine." 
In 1797 he published a work on marriage and divorce entitled 
" The Dialogue of Alcuin." In the following year, — the year 
of the " Lyrical Ballads," — he produced his first novel, 
" Wieland," which had popular success. Within three years 
he had published five other novels. In 1799 he became 
editor of the " Monthly Magazine and American Review," 
which lasted only a few months. For five years after 1803 
he edited " The Literary Magazine and American Register." 
The names of these periodicals, like that of the " Columbus 
Magazine " to which he had contributed years before, are 
worth mention only because we are always in danger of forget- 
ting what weedy crops of such nature had long ago sprung up 
and withered in our country. The greater part of Brown's 
literary life was passed in New York. He died of consump- 
tion on the 22d of February, 1810. 

Brown's mature years came during that period, between the 



i6o THE MIDDLE STATES, ijgS-iSsy 

Revolution and the War of 1812, when the nationally 
independent feeling of America was most acutely conscious. 
For the first time Europeans were becoming aware that 
America existed. Native Americans were consequently 
possessed by an impulse, not yet wholly past, to declare to 
all mankind, and particularly to Europeans, that Americans are 
a race of remarkable merit. This impulse — the " American 
brag " so frequently remarked by foreigners — is clearly evident 
in the works of Brown -, it is more so still in the books which 
Dunlap and Prescott wrote about him. These biographers 
were disposed not only to speak of him in such superlative 
terms as occasionally make one fear lest the American vocabu- 
lary may lose the positive degree of adjectives ; but also to 
maintain as his chief claim to eminence that his work, being 
purely American, must of course be thoroughly original. 

The most cursory glance at Brown's English contempora- 
ries should have reminded them that no claim could be much 
worse founded. During the last ten years of the eighteenth 
century, English literature was not particularly rich. Among 
its most conspicuous phases was a kind of darkly romantic 
novel, which probably reached highest development in the 
more extravagant work of Germany when Germans were 
obese and romantic and sentimental. Half a century before, 
English fiction had produced masterpieces, — "Clarissa Har- 
lowe," for example, " Tom Jones," " Tristram Shandy," and 
" The Vicar of Wakefield." Between 1 790 and 1 800 English 
fiction was in that apparently decadent and really abortive 
condition manifested by such books as Lewis's " Monk," 
Mrs. Radcliffe's " Mysteries of Udolpho," and Godwin's 
more significant " Caleb Williams." 

Godwin is partly remembered because of his great influence 
on Shelley, which resulted in the poet's application to the 
philosopher's own family of those principles concerning love 
and marriage which Godwin so coolly set forth. Really, 
however, the man had power enough to be remembered for 



BROCKDEN BROWN i6i 

himself; deeply influenced by the rationalistic philosophy of 
the eighteenth century, he devoted himself both in such direct 
writings as his " Political Justice," and in such medicated 
fiction as" Caleb Williams," to expounding deeply revolutionary 
ideas. "Caleb Williams" is a story w^ritten to demonstrate 
how hopelessly the artificial conditions of society and law may 
distort a normally worthy character. The hero has com- 
mitted a murder, morally justifiable, but legally a capital crime. 
To avert the legal consequence of his act, he is driven to a 
course of deceit and falsehood which finally changes him into 
an utter villain. We are left to infer that when law and 
morals happen not to coincide, law is a monstrous evil. In- 
cidentally " Caleb Williams " is written in what is meant to 
be a thrillingly mysterious styie. The crimes and the distor- 
tion of character with which it deals are dark and horrible. 
At least in manner and temper, then, the book has something 
in common with such sensational, meaningless novels as the 
" Mysteries of Udolpho," which were then at the height of 
their popularity. 

Though this kind of literature has happily proved abortive, 
it deeply affected several men properly eminent in English 
literature. If Shelley had written only such trivial fiction 
as " Zastrozzi," however, and De Quincey nothing more 
significant than "Klosterheim," neither name would now be 
remembered. The masterpiece of this school is probably 
Mrs. Shelley's deeply imaginative "Frankenstein," published 
in 1817 ; its last manifestations in England may perhaps be 
found among the earlier and more ridiculous works of 
Bulwer Lytton. Nowadays all this seems so lifelessly 
antiquated that one is prone to forget how slight were the 
indications in 1798 that the main current of English let- 
ters was so soon to take another and more wholesome 
direction. 

Were there no direct evidence that Brockden Brown was 
consciously influenced by Godwin, the fact might be inferred 

II 



1 62 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-18^7 

from the discussion of marriage in the " Dialogue of Alcuin," 
from which Dunlap gives copious extracts : — 

" Marriage," writes Brown, who is believed to have lived a blame- 
less private life, '* is an union founded on free and mutual consent. 
It cannot exist without friendship. It cannot exist without personal 
fidelity. As soon as the union ceases to be spontaneous, it ceases to 
be just. This is the sum. If I were to talk for months I could add 
nothing to the completeness of the definition." 

Brown's admiration of Godwin might equally be inferred 
from the general character of his style j but for their historical 
relation we have better authority still. While Dunlap insists 
so strongly on Brown's individuality, he actually quotes words 
of Brown's which assert that he deliberately made Godwin his 
model : — 

" What is the nature or merit of my performance ? — When a mental 
comparison is made between this and the mass of novels, I am in- 
clined to be pleased with my own production. But when the objects 
of comparison are changed, and I revolve the transcendent merits of 
' Caleb Williams,' my pleasure is diminished, and is preserved from a 
total extinction only by the reflection that this performance is the 
first." 

The truth is that, at least in his philosophical speculations 
and his novels, Brockden Brown, honestly aspiring to prove 
America highly civilised, was instinctively true to the Ameri- 
can temper of his time in attempting to prove this by con- 
scientious imitation. What he happened to imitate was a 
temporarily fashionable phase of stagnant English fiction. 
Nothing better marks the difference between English literature 
and American in 1798 than that this year produced both the 
"Lyrical Ballads" and "Wieland." The former first ex- 
pressed a new literary spirit in England; the latter, the first 
serious work of American letters, was as far from new as 
Wordsworth's verses and the "Ancient Mariner" were from 
conventional. Beyond doubt one's first impression is that the 
novels of Brown are merely imitative. 



BROCKDEN BROWN 163 

After a while, however, one begins to feel, beneath his con- 
scientious imitative effort, a touch of something individual. 
In that epoch-making " Wieland," the hero is a gentleman 
of Philadelphia, who in the midst of almost ideal happiness is 
suddenly accosted by a mysterious voice which orders him to 
put to death his superhumanly perfect wife and children. 
The mysterious voice, which pursues him through increasing 
moods of horror, declares itself to be that of God. At last, 
driven to madness by this appalling command, Wieland obeys it 
and murders his family. To this point, in spite of confusion 
and turgidity, the story has power. The end is ludicrously 
weak; the voice of God turns out to have been merely the 
trick of a malignant ventriloquist. The triviahty of this 
catastrophe tends to make you feel as if all the preceding 
horrors had been equally trivial. Really this is not the case. 
The chapters in which the mind of Wieland is gradually pos- 
sessed by delusion could have been written only by one who 
had genuinely felt a sense of what hideously mysterious things 
may lie beyond human ken. Some such sense as this, in ter- 
ribly serious form, haunted the imagination of Puritans. In a 
meretricious form it appears in the work of Poe. In a form 
alive with beauty it reveals itself throughout the melancholy 
romances of Hawthorne. In Poe's work and in Hawthorne's, 
it is handled with something like mastery, and few men 
of letters have been much further from mastery of their art 
than Charles Brockden Brown ; but the sense of horror which 
Brown expressed in " Wieland " is genuine. To feel its 
power you need only compare it with the similar feeling ex- 
pressed in Lewis's " Monk," in the •■' Mysteries of Udolpho," 
or even in " Caleb Williams " itself. 

In two of Brown's later novels, " Ormond " and "Arthur 
Mervyn," there are touches more directly from life which show 
another kind of power. Among his most poignant personal 
experiences was the terrible fact of epidemic yellow fever. 
During a visitation of this scourge Brown was in New York, 



I64 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-1837 

where he was on intimate terms with one Dr. Smith, a young 
physician of about his own age. An Itahan gentleman, arriv- 
ing in town with an introduction to Dr. Smith, was taken 
with the plague and refused lodging in any respectable hotel. 
Smith found him, terribly ill, in a cheap lodging-house, 
whence he took him home. There the Italian died ; and 
Smith, who contracted the disease, died too. Brockden 
Brown was with them all the while ; he came to know the 
pestilence appallingly well. In both " Ormond " and " Arthur 
iMervyn " there are descriptions of epidemic yellow fever 
almost as powerful as Defoe's descriptions of the London 
plague. The passage in " Arthur Mervyn," for example, 
which describes a yellow fever hospital is hideously vivid : — 

"After a time I opened my eyes, and slowly gained some knowl- 
edge of my situation. I lay upon a mattress, whose condition proved 
that an half decayed corpse had recently been dragged from it. The 
room was large, but it was covered with beds like my own. Between 
each, there was scarcely the interval of three feet. Each sustained a 
wretch, whose groans and distortions bespoke the desperateness of 
his condition. . . . 

" You will scarcely believe that, in this scene of horrors, the sound 
of laughter should be overheard. While the upper rooms of this 
building are filled with the sick and the dying, the lower apartments 
are the scenes of carousals and mirth. The wretches who are hired, 
at enormous wages, to tend the sick and convey away the dead, 
neglect their duty and consume the cordials, which are provided for 
the patients, in debauchery and riot. A female visage, bloated with 
malignity and drunkenness, occasionally looked in. Dying eyes were 
cast upon her, invoking the boon, perhaps, of a drop of cold water, or 
her assistance to change a posture which compelled him to behold 
the ghastly writhings or dreadful smile of his neighbour. 

" The visitant had left the banquet for a moment, only to see who 
was dead. If she entered the room, blinking eyes and reeling steps 
showed her to be totally unqualified for ministering the aid that was 
needed. Presently she disappeared and others ascended the stair- 
case, a coffin was deposited at the door, the wretch, whose heart still 
quivered, was seized by rude hands, and dragged along the floor into 
the passage." 

The power, indicated in descriptions like that, of setting his 
scenes in a vividly real background again distinguishes Brown 



BROCKDEN BROWN 165 

from his English contemporaries. His characters, mean- 
while, are lifelessly conventional. In " Ormond," for example, 
the villanous seducer who out-Lovelaces Lovelace in a literal 
Philadelphia is irretrievably " make believe ; " and so is the in- 
credibly spotless Constantia Dudley, who, oddly enough, is 
said to have impressed Shelley as the most perfect creature of 
human imagination. There is a funny touch in " Ormond," 
which brings out as clearly as anything the contrast between 
Brown's true backgrounds and his tritely fictitious characters. 
Constantia Dudley, with a blind father on her hands, in the 
midst of epidemic yellow fever, is persecuted by her seducer 
at a moment when the total resources of the family amount 
to about five dollars. Old Mr. Dudley — who incidentally 
and for no reason has once been a drunkard, but has now 
recovered every paternal excellence — has travelled all over 
the world. In the course of his journeys in Italy he has re- 
marked that the people of that country live very well on 
polenta^ which is nothing but a mixture of Indian meal and 
water, resembling the Hasty Pudding so dear to the heart of 
Joel Barlow. In Philadelphia at that time Indian meal could 
be purchased very cheaply. With about two dollars and 
three quarters, then, Constantia procures meal enough to 
preserve the lives of her father, herself, and their devoted ser- 
vant for something like three months, thereby triumphantly 
protecting her virtue from the assaults of wealthy persecution. 
Now, it is said that these facts concerning the price and the 
nutritive qualities of Indian meal are as true as were the 
horrors of yellow fever. Constantia and her father, mean- 
while, and the wicked seducer, whose careers were so affected 
by these statistics, are rather less like anything human than 
are such marionettes as doubtless delighted the Italian travels 
of Mr. Dudley. 

The veracity of Brown's backgrounds appears again in 
" Edgar Huntley." The incidents of this story are unim- 
portant, except as they carry a somnambulist into the woods 



1 66 THE MIDDLE STATES, lygS-iSsy 

and caves of the Pennsylvanian country. These, despite 
some theatrically conventional touches, are almost as real as 
the somnambulist is not. Such incongruities cannot blend 
harmoniously ; Brown's incessant combination of reality in 
nature with unreality in character produces an effect of 
bewildering confusion. 

Nor is this confusion in Brown's novels wholly a matter 
of conception. Few writers anywhere seem at first more 
hopelessly to lack constructive power. Take " Arthur 
Mervyn," for example : the story begins in the first person ; 
the narrator meets somebody in whose past history he is in- 
terested ; thereupon the second personage begins to narrate 
his own past, also in the first person ; in the course of this 
narrative a third character appears, who soon proceeds to be- 
gin a third autobiography ; and so on. As one who is be- 
wildered by this confusion, however, pauses to unravel it or to 
wonder what it means, a significant fact presents itself. Who- 
ever tries to write fiction must soon discover one of his most 
difficult problems to be the choice and maintenance of a defi- 
nite point of view. To secure one, this device of assuming 
the first person is as old as the " Odyssey," where Odysseus 
narrates so many memorable experiences to the king of the 
Phaeacians. In brief, a resort to this world-old device gener- 
ally indicates a conscious effort to get material into manage- 
able form. Paradoxical as it seems, then, these inextricable 
tangles of autobiography, which make Brockden Brown's con- 
struction appear so formless, probably arose from an impo- 
tent sense that form ought to be striven for ; and, indeed, 
when any one of his autobiographic episodes is taken by itself, 
it will generally be found pretty satisfactory. 

When we come to the technical question of style, too, 
the simple test of reading aloud will show that Brockden 
Brown's sense of form was unusual. Of course his work 
shows many of the careless faults inevitable when men write 
with undue haste; and his vocabulary is certainly turgid; 



BROCKDEN BROWN 167 

and consciously trying to write effectively, he often wrote 
absurdly ; but the man's ear was true. In reading any page 
of his aloud, you will find your voice dwelling where the 
sense requires it to dwell. Critics have remarked that if 
you wish to distinguish between the style of Addison and 
that of Steele, all you need do is to apply a vocal test. Addi- 
son's ear was so delicate that you require little art to bring out 
the emphasis of his periods ; Steele wrote more for the eye. 
In other words, Steele comparatively lacked a trait which 
Addison and Brockden Brown possessed — an instinctive sense 
of formal phrasing. 

If we regard Brockden Brown only as an imitator, — and 
as such he is perhaps most significant, — we may instructively 
remark that the literature of America begins exactly where 
the pure literature of a normally developed language is apt to 
leave off. A great literature, originating from the heart of 
the people, declares itself first in spontaneous songs and bal- 
lads and legends ; it is apt to end in prose fiction. With 
laboured prose fiction our American literature begins. The 
laboured prose fiction of Brown has traits, however, which dis- 
tinguish it from similar work in England. To begin with, 
the sense of horror which permeates it is not conventional 
but genuine. Brockden Brown could instinctively feel, more 
deeply than almost any native Englishman since the days of 
Elizabeth, what mystery may lurk just beyond human ken. 
In the second place. Brown's work, for all its apparent con- 
fusion, proves confused chiefly by impotent, futile attempt to 
assure his point of view by autobiographic device. In the 
third place he reveals on almost every page an instinctive 
sense of rhythmical form. 

Brown's six novels are rather long, and all hastily written ; 
and in his short, invalid life he never attempted any other form 
of fiction. As one considers his work, however, one may well 
incline to guess that if he had confined his attempts to single 
episodes, — if he had had the originality, in short, to invent 



i68 THE MIDDLE STATES, lygS-iSsj 

the short story, — he might have done work favourably com- 
parable with that of Irving or Poe or even Hawthorne. 
Brockden Brown, in brief, never stumbled on the one literary 
form which he might have mastered ; pretty clearly that 
literary form was the sort of romantic short story whose 
motive is mysterious ; and since his time that kind of short 
story has proved itself the most characteristic phase of native 
American fiction. 



II 



WASHINGTON IRVING 

The name of Washington Irving reminds us rather startlingly 
how short is the real history of American letters. Although 
he has been dead for a little more than forty years, many 
people still remember him personally ; and when in 1842 he 
went as President Tyler's minister to Spain, he passed through 
an England where Queen Victoria had already been five years 
on the throne, and he presented his credentials to Queen 
Isabella II., who, although long exiled from her country, is 
still a not very old lady in Paris. Yet in one sense this 
Irving, who has not yet faded from living memory, may be 
called, more certainly than Brockden Brown, the first American 
man of letters. At least, he was the first whose work has re- 
mained popular ; and the first, too, who was born after the 
Revolution had made native Americans no longer British sub- 
jects but citizens of the United States. His parents, to be 
sure, were foreign, his father Scotch, his mother English ; but 
he himself was born in New York in 1783. He was not 
very strong; his early habits were rather desultory and his 
education irregular ; he studied law and was admitted to the 
bar, but never practised much ; and at the age of twenty-one 
he was sent abroad for his health. There he remained two 
years. 

His distinctly American character first becomes salient dur- 
ing this trip abroad, at that time an unusual experience. 
He was of simple origin ; his family were in respectable 
trade. Born in England, he might have been as accomplished 
and agreeable as he ever became, but he could hardly have 



I70 THE MIDDLE STATES, 17^8-1857 

been received on equal terms by the polite society of Europe. 
Going abroad, as an American citizen, however, he took 
from the beginning a social position there which he main- 
tained to the end. He was cordially received by people of 
rank, and incidentally had little to do with those of the station 
which would have been his had his family never emigrated to 
this side of the Atlantic. He was among the first, in short, 
of that distinguished body of Americans, of whom later ex- 
amples are such men as Ticknor, Everett, Sumner, Motley, 
and Lowell, who have proved during the nineteenth century 
the social dignity of American letters. 

In 1806, Irving returned home; the next year, in company 
with one or two kinsmen, he began writing a series of essays 
called the " Salmagundi Papers." Only his subsequent emi- 
nence has preserved from blameless oblivion these conven- 
tional survivals of the eighteenth century. About this time 
occurred an episode which deeply influenced his whole life : 
he fell in love with a young girl whose death at seventeen 
almost broke his heart. When she died he was at her bed- 
side ; and throughout his later life he could not bear to hear 
her name mentioned. The tender melancholy which one 
recognises all through his writings was probably due -to this 
bereavement ; and the intense simplicity and faithfulness of 
his pure and ideal love is characteristic not only of the man 
but of his country. 

In 1809 he published his first considerable book, — the 
" Knickerbocker History of New York." Shortly thereafter 
he devoted himself to business j and in 18 15 he went abroad 
in connection with his affairs. There, after a few years, com- 
mercial misfortune overtook him. In 18 19 he brought out 
his " Sketc h Book ; " from that time forth he was a pro- 
fessional man of letters. He remained abroad until 1832, 
spending the years between 1826 and 1829 in Spain, and 
those between 1829 and 1832 as Secretary to the American 
Legation in London. Coming home, he resided for ten years 



IRVING 171 

at Tarrytown on the Hudson, in that house " Sunnyside " 
which has become associated with his name. From 1842 to 
1846 he was Minister to Spain. He then finally returned 
home, crowning his literary work with his " Life of Wash- 
ington," of which the last volume appeared in the year of his 
death, 1859. 

Irving was the first American man of letters to attract 
wide attention abroad. The " Knickerbocker History " was 
favourably received by contemporary England ; and the " Sketch 
Book " and " Bracebridge Hall," which followed it, were 
from the beginning what they have remained, — as popular 
in England as they have been in his native country. The 
same, on the whole, is true of his writings about Spain j and, 
to somewhat slighter degree, of his " Life of Goldsmith " and 
his " Life of Washington." The four general classes of 
work here mentioned followed one another in fairly distinct 
succession through his half-century of literary life. We may 
perhaps get our clearest notion of him by considering them 
in turn. 

The " Knickerbocker History of New York " has properly 
lasted. The origin of this book resembles that of Fielding's 
" Joseph Andrews " some seventy years before, and of Dick- 
ens's " Pickwick Papers " some twenty-five years later. All 
three began as burlesques and ended as independent works of 
fiction, retaining of their origin little more trace than occa- 
sional extravagance. In 1807 one Dr. Samuel Latham 
Mitchill had published " A Picture of New York," said to be 
ridiculous, even among works of its time, for ponderous pre- 
tentiousness. The book had such success, however, that Irv- 
ing and his brother were moved to write a parody of it. 
Before long Irving's brother tired of the work, which was left 
to Irving himself. As he wrote on, his style and purpose 
underwent a change. Instead of burlesquing Mitchill, he 
found himself composing a comic history of old New York, 
and incidentally introducing a good deal of personal and polit- 



172 THE MIDDLE STATES, 17^8-1857 

ical satire, now as forgotten as that which lies neglected in 
" Gulliver's Travels." His style, which began in deliberately 
ponderous imitation of Dr. Mitchill's, passed almost insensibly 
into one of considerable freedom, evidently modelled on that 
of eighteenth-century England. Most of the book, then, 
reads like some skilful bit of English writing during the gen- 
eration which preceded the American Revolution. The 
substance of the book, however, is distinctly different from 
what was then usual in England. 

Assuming throughout the character of Diedrich Knicker- 
bocker, an eccentric old bachelor who typifies the decaying 
Dutch families of New York, Irving mingles with many actual 
facts of colonial history all manner of unbridled extravagance. 
The governors and certain other of his personages are histori- 
cal ; the wars with New Englanders are historical wars ; and 
historical, too, is the profound distaste for Yankee character 
which Washington Irving needed no assumed personality to 
feel. But throughout the book there mingles with these his- 
torical facts the wildest sort of sportive nonsense. Wouter 
Van Twiller, to take a casual example, was an authentic Dutch 
governor of New Amsterdam ; and here is the way in which 
Irving writes about him : — 

" In his council he presided with great state and solemnity. He 
sat in a huge chair of solid oak, hewn in the celebrated forest of the 
Hague, fabricated by an experienced timmerman of Amsterdam, and 
curiously carved about the arms and feet, into exact imitations of 
gigantic eagle's claws. Instead of a sceptre he swayed a long Turk- 
ish pipe, wrought with jasmin and amber, which had been presented 
to a stadtholder of Holland, at the conclusion of a treaty with one of 
the petty Barbary powers. In this stately chair would he sit, and 
this magnificent pipe would he smoke, shaking his right knee with 
constant motion, and fixing his eye for hours together upon a little 
print of Amsterdam, which hung in a black frame against the op- 
posite wall of the council chamber. Nay, it has even been said that 
when any deliberation of extraordinary length and intricacy was on the 
carpet, the renowned Wouter would shut his eyes for full two hours 
at a time, that he might not be disturbed by external objects — and at 
such times the internal commotion of liis mind was evinced by certain 



IRVING 173 

regular guttural sounds, which his admirers declared were merely the 
noise of conflict, made by his contending doubts and opinions." 

More than possibly the chair here mentioned was some real 
chair which Irving had seen and in which an old Dutch gov- 
ernor might have sat. Conceivably the Turkish pipe may 
have been at least legendarily true. The rest of the passage 
is utter extravagance ; yet you will be at a little pains to say 
just where fact passes nonsense. 

Though this kind of humour is not unprecedented, one 
thing about it is worth attention. When we were consider- 
ing the work of Franklin, we found in his letter to a London 
newspaper concerning the state of the American colonies a 
grave mixture of fact and nonsense, remarkably like the 
American humour of our later days. In Irving's " Knick- 
erbocker History " one finds something very similar. The 
fun of the thing lies in frequent and often imperceptible 
lapses from sense to nonsense and back again. Something 
of the same kind, expressed in a far less gracious manner than 
Irving's, underlies Mark Twain's comic work and that of our 
latest journalistic humourist, Mr. Dooley. This deliberate con- 
fusion of sense and nonsense, in short, proves generally charac- 
teristic of American humour ; and although the formal amenity 
of Irving's style often makes him seem rather an imitator of 
the eighteenth-century English writers than a native Ameri- 
can, one can feel that if the " Knickerbocker History " and 
Franklin's letter could be reduced to algebraic formulae, these 
formulae would pretty nearly coincide both with one another 
and with that of the " Innocents Abroad." The temper of 
the " Knickerbocker History," may, accordingly, be regarded 
as freshly American. The style, meanwhile, is rather like 
that of Goldsmith. When the " Knickerbocker History " 
was published, Goldsmith had been dead for thirty-five years. 
In Irving, then, we find a man who used the traditional style 
of eighteenth-century England for a purpose foreign at once 
to the century and the country of its origin. 



174 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-18^7 

It was ten years before Irving again appeared as a seri- 
ous man of letters. Then came the " Sketch Book," which 
contains his best-known stories, — " Rip Van Winkle " and 
*'The Legend' of Sleepy Hollow." The book is a col- 
lection of essays and short stories, written in a style more 
like Goldsmith's than ever. The year in which it appeared 
was that which gave to England the first two cantos of " Don 
Juan," Hazlitt's "Lectures on the Comic Writers," Leigh 
Hunt's "Indicator," Scott's "Bride of Lammermoor " and 
" Legend of Montrose," Shelley's " Cenci," and Words- 
worth's " Peter Bell." There can be little doubt that in 
formal style the " Sketch Book " is more conscientious than 
any of these. Its prose, in fact, has hardly been surpassed, if 
indeed it has been equalled, in nineteenth-century England. 
This prose, however, is of that balanced, cool, rhythmical 
sort which in England flourished most during the mid years 
of the eighteenth century. 

In the " Sketc h Book," to o> there are many papers and 
passages which might have come straight from some of the 
later eighteenth-century essayists. On the other hand, there 
are many passages, such as " Rip Van Winkle," which could 
hardly have appeared in Goldsmith's England. Though Gold- 
smith's England, of course, was becoming sentimental, it never 
got to that delight in a romantic past which characterised the 
period of which the dominant writer was Sir Walter Scott. 
By 1 8 19, however, Scott had attained his highest development. 
In his work there was far more passion and meaning than in 
the romantic stories of Irving ; in technical form, on the 
other hand, it is comparatively careless, nor on the whole is it 
more genuinely permeated with the romantic sentiment of the 
nineteenth century. The story of Rip Van Winkle, for ex- 
ample, is a legend which exists in various European forms. 
Whether Irving adopted it from such old German tales as 
that of the sleeping Barbarossa, or from some Spanish story 
such as he later told when he described the sleep of enchanted 



IRVING 175 

Moors, or whether in his time the legend itself had migrated 
to the Hudson Valley, makes no difference. He assumed that 
it belonged in the Catskills. He placed it, as a little earlier 
Brockden Brown placed his less significant romances, in a 
real background ; and he infused into it the romantic spirit 
which was already characteristic of European letters, and soon 
to be almost more so of American. He enlivened the tale, 
meanwhile, with a subdued form of such humour as runs riot 
in the " Knickerbocker History;" and all this modern senti- 
ment, he phrased as he had phrased his first book, in terms 
modelled on the traditional style of a generation or two be- 
fore. The peculiar trait of the " Sketch Book," in short, is 
its combination of fresh romantic feeling with traditional 
Augustan style. 

The passages of the" Sketch Book" which deal with Eng- 
land reveal so sympathetic a sense of old English tradition 
that some of them, like those concerning Stratford and West- 
minster Abbey, have become almost classical ; just as Irving's 
later work, " Bracebridge Hall," is now generally admitted 
to typify a pleasant phase of country life in England almost as 
well as Sir Roger de Coverley typified another, a century 
earlier. There are papers in the " Sketch Book," however, 
which from our point of view are more significant. Take 
those, for example, on " John Bull " and on " English Writ- 
ers concerning America." Like the writing of Hopkinson at 
the time of the American Revolution, these reveal a distinct 
sense on the part of an able and cultivated American that the 
contemporary English differ from our countrymen. The eye 
which observed John Bull in the aspect which follows, is 
foreign to England : — 

"Though really a good-hearted, good-tempered old fellow at bot- 
tom, yet he is singularly fond of being in the midst of contention. It 
is one of his peculiarities, however, that he only relishes the begin- 
ning of an affray ; he always goes into a fight with alacrity, but comes 
out of it grumbling even when victorious ; and though no one fights 
with more obstinacy to carry a contested point, yet, when the battle 



176 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-1837 

is over, and he comes to the reconciliation, he is so much taken up 
with the mere shaking of hands, that he is apt to let his antagonist 
pocket all that they have been quarreUing about. It is not, therefore, 
fighting that he ought so much to be on his guard against, as making 
friends. It is difficult to cudgel him out of a farthing ; but put him in 
a good humour, and you may bargain him out of all the money in his 
pocket. He is like a stout ship, which will weather the roughest 
storm uninjured, but roll its masts overboard in the succeeding calm. 

" He is a little fond of playing the magnifico abroad ; of pulling out 
a long purse ; flinging his money bravely about at boxing matches, 
horse races, cock fights, and carrying a high head among 'gentlemen 
of the fancy ; ' but immediately after one of these fits of extravagance, 
he will be taken with violent qualms of economy; talk desperately of 
being ruined and brought upon the parish ; and, in such moods, will 
not pay the smallest tradesman's bill, without violent altercation. He 
is in fact the most punctual and discontented paymaster in the world ; 
drawing his coin out of his breeches pocket with infinite reluctance ; 
paying to the uttermost farthing, but accompanying every guinea with 
a growl. 

" With all his talk of economy, however, he is a bountiful provider, 
and a hospitable housekeeper. His economy is of a whimsical kind, 
its chief object being to devise how he may afford to be extravagant ; 
for he will begrudge himself a beef-steak and pint of port one day, 
that he may roast an ox whole, broach a hogshead of ale, and treat 
all his neighbours on the next." 



'«3' 



In " Bracebridge Hall " and the " Tales of a Traveller," 
works which followed the " Sketcli Book," Irving did little 
more than continue the sort of thing which he had done in the 
first. Perhaps his most noteworthy feat in all three books is 
that he made prominent in English literature a literary form 
in which for a long time to come Americans excelled native 
Englishmen, — the short story. During our century, of 
course, England has produced a great school of fiction;'^ and 
except for Cooper and one or two living writers, America 
can hardly show full-grown novels so good even as those of 
Anthony Trollope, not to speak of the masterpieces of Dick- 
ens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. Certainly until the time of 
Robert Louis Stevenson, however, no English-speaking writer 
out of America had produced many short stones of such 
merit as anybody can recognise in the work of Hawthorne 



IRVING 177 

and Poe and Irving. In this fact there is something akin to 
that other fact which we have just remarked, — the formal 
superiority of Irving's style to that of contemporary English- 
men. The English novel, whatever its merits, runs to inter- 
minable length, with a disregard of form unprecedented in 
other civilised literature. A good short story, on the other 
hand, must generally have complete and finished form. Now, 
during the nineteenth century American men of letters have 
usually had a more conscious sense of form than their English 
contemporaries. The American conscience, in fact, always 
a bit overdeveloped, has sometimes seemed evident m our 
attempts at literary art. No one who lacks artistic conscience 
can write an effective short story ; and it is doubtful whether 
any one troubled with much artistic conscience can write in less 
than a lifetime a three-volume novel. The artistic conscience 
revealed in the finish of Irving's style and in his mastery of 
the short story, then, may be called characteristic of his 
country. 

Equally characteristic of America, in the somewhat different 
manner foreshadowed by " Bracebridge Hall " and the " Tales 
of a Traveller," are the series of Irving's writings, between 
1828 and 1832, which deal with Spain. He was first 
attracted thither by a proposition that he should translate a 
Spanish book concerning Columbus. Instead of so doing, he 
ended by writing his " Life of Columbus," which was fol- 
lowed by his " Conquest of Granada " and his " Tales of the 
Alhambra." For Americans, Spain has sometimes had more 
romantic charm than all the rest of Europe put together. In 
the first place, as the very name of Columbus should remind 
us, its history is inextricably connected with our own. In 
the second place, at the very moment when this lasting con- 
nection between Spain and the New World declared itself, 
the eight hundred years' struggle between Moors and Spaniards 
had at length ended in the triumph of the Christians ; and no 
other conflict of the whole European past involved a contrast 

12 



178 THE MIDDLE STATES, ijgS-iSjj 

of life and of ideals more vivid, more complete, more varied, 
or more prolonged. In the third place, the decline of Spain 
began almost immediately ; so in the early nineteenth century 
Spain had altered less since the middle ages than any other 
part of Europe. Elsewhere an American traveller could find 
traces of the picturesque, romantic, vanished past. In Spain 
he could find a state of life so little changed from olden time 
that he seemed almost to travel into that vanished past it- 
self. 

Now, as the American character of the nineteenth cen- 
tury has declared itself, few of its aesthetic traits are more 
marked than eager delight in olden splendours. Such delight, 
of course, has characterised the nineteenth century in Europe 
as well as among ourselves. A modern Londoner, however, 
who can walk in a forenoon from Westminster Abbey to the 
Temple Church and so to the Tower, can never dream of 
what such monuments mean to an imagination which has 
grown up amid no grander relics of antiquity than King's 
Chapel or Independence Hall, than gray New England farm- 
houses and the moss-grown gravestones of Yankee burying- 
grounds. To any sensitive nature^ brought up in nineteenth- 
century America, the mere sight of anything so immemorially 
human as a European landscape must have in it some touch 
of that stimulatmg power which the Europe of the Renais- 
sance found in the fresh discovery of classical literature and art- 
Americans can still feel the romance even of modern London 
or Paris ; and to this day there is no spot where our starved 
craving for human antiquity can be more profusely satisfied 
than amid the decaying but not vanished monuments of Chris- 
tian and of Moorish Spain. No words have ever expressed 
this satisfaction more sincerely or more spontaneously than the 
fantastic stories of old Spain which Irving has left us. 

His later work was chiefly biographical. His " Life of 
Goldsmith " and his " Life of Washington " alike are written 
with all his charm and with vivid imagination. Irving, how- 



IRVING 1 79 

ever, was no trained scholar. He was far even from the 
critical habit of the New England historians, and further still 
from such learning as is now apt to make history something 
like exact science. It may be doubted whether Irving's 
Goldsmith or his Washington can be accepted as the Gold- 
smith or the Washington who once trod the earth ; yet his 
Goldsmith and Washington, and the other personages whom 
he introduced into their stories, are at least living human 
beings. His work is perhaps halfway between history and 
fiction ; imaginative history is perhaps the best name for it. 
As usual, he was preoccupied almost as much with a desire 
to write charmingly as with a purpose to write truly ; but in 
' itself this desire was beautifully true. Throughout, one feels, 
Irving wrote as well as he could, and he knew how to write 
better than almost any contemporary Englishman. 

No doubt a great deal of English work contemporary with 
Irving's is of deeper value. Our hasty glance at his literary 
'career has perhaps shown what this first of our recognised 
men of letters — the first American who in his own lifetime 
established a lasting European reputation — really accom- 
plished. His greatest merits, which nothing can abate, are per- 
vasive artistic conscience, admirable and persistent senseof form, 
and constant devotion to his literary ideals. If we ask our- 
selves, however, what he used his admirable style to express, 
we find in the first place a quaintly extravagant sort of humour 
growing more delicate with the years ; next we find romantic 
sentiment set forth in the beautifully polished phrases of a past 
English generation whose native temper had been rather classi- 
cal than romantic ; then we find a deeply lasting delight in 
the splendours of an unfathomably romantic past ; and finally 
we come to pleasantly vivid romantic biographies. One thing 
here is pretty clear : the man had no message. From begin- 
ning to end he was animated by no profound sense of the 
mystery of existence. Neither the solemn eternities which 
stir philosophers and theologians, nor the actual lessons as dis- 



i8o THE MIDDLE STATES, ijgS-iSsy 

tinguished from the superficial circumstances of human ex- 
perience, ever much engaged his thought. Delicate, refined, 
romantic sentiment he set forth in delicate, refined classic 
style. One may often wonder whether he had much to say j 
one can never question that he wrote beautifully. 

This was the first recognised literary revelation of the New 
World to the Old. In a previous generation, Edwards had 
made American theology a fact for all Calvinists to reckon 
with. The political philosophers of the Revolution had made 
our political and legal thought matters which even the Old 
World could hardly neglect. When we come to pure litera- 
ture, however, in which America should at last express to 
Europe what life meant to men of artistic sensitiveness living 
under the conditions of our new and emancipated society, 
what we find is little more than greater delicacy of form than 
existed in contemporary England. Irving is certainly a per- 
manent literary figure. What makes him so is not novelty or 
power, but charming refinement. 



in 

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

In 1820, American literature, at least so far as it has survived 
even in tradition, consisted of the work of Brockden Brown, 
then ten years dead, and of Irving's " Sketch Book," the first 
edition of which had appeared the year before. Apart from 
these works, what had been produced in this country was so 
obviously imitative as to express only a sense on the part of 
our numerous writers that they ought to copy the eminent 
authors of England. In 1820 appeared the first work of a 
new novelist, soon to attain not only permanent reputation in 
America, but also a European recognition more general than 
Irving's, if not so critically admiring. This was James 
Fenimore Cooper. 

He was born in New Jersey in 1789. When he was 
about a year old his father, a gentleman of means, migrated to 
that region in the wilderness of Central New York where 
Cooperstown now preserves his name. Here the father 
founded and christened the settlement where for the rest of 
his life he maintained a position of almost feudal superiority. 
Here, in a country so wild as to be almost primeval, Cooper 
was brought up. Before he was fourteen years old he went 
to Yale College, then in charge of its great President, Timothy 
Dwight ; but some academic trouble brought his college career 
to a premature end. The years between 1806 and 18 10 he 
spent at sea, first as a kind of apprentice on a merchant 
vessel, afterward as an ofiicer in the navy. In 181 1, having 
married a lady of the Tory family of De Lancey, he resigned 
his commission. 



1 82 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-1837 

After several years of inconspicuous life — he was living at 
the time in the country near New York City — he read some 
now forgotten but temporarily fashionable English novel ; and 
stirred by the notion that he could write a better, he rapidly 
produced a story, now almost as forgotten as its model, en- 
titled "Precaution." This, published in 1820, was a tale of 
fashionable life in England, of which at the time Cooper knew 
very little. It had a measure of success, being mistaken for 
the anonymous work of some English woman of fashion. 
In the following year Cooper produced " The Spy," an histori- 
cal novel of the American Revolution, then less than fifty 
years past. In 1823 came "The Pioneers," the first in pub- 
lication of his Leather-Stocking tales ; and just at the begin- 
ning of 1824 appeared " The Pilot," the first of his stories of 
the sea. " The Last of the Mohicans," perhaps his master- 
piece, was published in 1826. In that year he went abroad, 
where he remained for seven years. He then came home, 
and resided for most of the rest of his life on the ancestral 
estate at Cooperstown, where he died in 1851. Peculiarities 
of temper kept him throughout his later years in chronic 
quarrels with the public, with his neighbours, and with almost 
everybody but some of his personal friends, who remained 
strongly attached to him. 

At the age of thirty, as we have seen, Cooper had never 
published anything ; he died at the age of sixty-two ; and in 
the incomplete list of his writings appended to Professor 
Lounsbury's biography of him there are some seventy entries. 
Of these hastily written works a number dealt with matters 
of fact ; for one thing, with characteristic asperity and lack of 
tact, he wrote books about both America and England, in 
which, when discussing either country, he seemed chiefly ani- 
mated by a desire to emphasise those truths which would be 
least welcome to the people concerned. He wrote, too, a 
considerable history of the American Navy which generously 
contributed to his personal difficulties. For years there had 



COOPER 183 

been a dispute among naval people as to the comparative 
merit in the battle of Lake Erie of Perry, whose name is 
permanently associated with that victory, and his second in 
command, a subsequently distinguished officer named Elliott. 
In his account of this battle, Cooper reserved his opinion, 
simply stating facts ; he was consequently held by the parti- 
sans both of Elliott and of Perry to have been what they 
certainly became, — venomously libellous. And long before 
the naval history appeared, he was already prosecuting news- 
paper after newspaper for personal criticisms, which but for 
these prosecutions — technically successful, by the way, — 
would long ago have been forgotten. 

A glance at Professor Lounsbury's bibliography, however, 
will show that with one exception all of Cooper's works 
which fall into this invidious class were written after the year 
in which Sir Walter Scott died, 1832 ; and that meantime, 
between 1820 and that date, he had produced at least ten 
novels which have maintained their position in literature. 
What is more, these novels almost immediately attained world- 
wide reputation ; they were translated not only into French, 
but also into many other languages of continental Europe, in 
which they preserve popularity. Great as was his success 
at home and in England, indeed, it is sometimes said to have 
been exceeded by that which he has enjoyed throughout con- 
tinental Europe. For this there is a reason which has been 
little remarked. The mere number and bulk of Cooper's 
works bear evidence to the fact that he must have written with 
careless haste. He had small literary training and little more 
tact in the matter of style than he displayed in his personal 
relations with people who did not enjoy his respect. Cooper's 
English, then, is often ponderous and generally clumsy. An 
odd result follows. His style is frequently such as could 
hardly be altered except for the better. A translator into 
whatever language can often say what Cooper said in a form 
more readable and agreeable than Cooper's own. Many of 



1 84 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-1837 

the minor passages in his writings seem more felicitous in 
French translation than in his own words. 

Yet his own words, though even in his best work impaired 
by clumsiness and prolixity, are well worth reading. He has 
been called the American Scott, and indeed was so called in 
his own time, for his reputation was literally contemporary 
with Sir Walter's. " The Spy " appeared in the same year 
with " Ken il worth " and " The Pirate ; " « The Pilot " in the 
year of " Quentin Durward." Now, Scott and Cooper really 
belong to different categories of merit. Scott, saturated with 
the traditions of a brave old human world, was gifted with 
an imagination so robust as to have invented in the historical 
novel a virtually new form of literature, and to have enlivened 
it with a host of characters so vital that among the creatures 
of English imagination his personages rank almost next to 
Shakspere's. When Cooper began to write, " Waverley " 
was already about six years old. In a certain sense, then, he 
may be said to have imitated Scott ; it is doubtful, however, 
whether he was by any means so conscious of his model 
as Brockden Brown was of Godwin, or Irving of Goldsmith. 
The resemblance between Cooper and Scott lies chiefly in the 
fact that each did his best work in fiction dealing with the 
romantic past of his own country. By just so much, then, as 
the past of Cooper's America was a slighter, less varied, less 
human past than that of Scott's England or Scotland, Cooper's 
work must remain inferior to Scott's in human interest. 
Partly for the same reason, the range of character created by 
Cooper is at once less wide and far less highly developed 
than that brought into being by Sir Walter. Cooper, in- 
deed, as the very difl!iculties of his later life would show, was 
temperamentally narrow in sympathy. It happened, for ex- 
ample, that he was an Episcopalian ; consequently, if for no 
other reason, he detested the New England Puritans. Now 
and again he introduced them into his novels ; and although 
he was too honest intentionally to misrepresent them, malig- 



COOPER 185 

nant caricature could hardly have strayed much further from 
the truth. And so on ; to compare Cooper with Scott, in- 
deed, except for the matter of popularity, in which they 
have often been neck and neck, is needlessly to belittle 
Cooper. Here we may better consider him in connection 
with his American contemporaries. 

When " The Spy " was published, the novels of Brockden 
Brown were already almost forgotten ; and Irving had pro- 
duced only "The Knickerbocker History" and the admirable 
essays of his " Sketch Book." " The Spy " is an historical 
novel of the American Revolution, often conventional, but at 
the same time set in a vivid background ; for Cooper, actually 
living in the country where he laid his scenes, sincerely en- 
deavoured not only to revive the fading past, but to do 
full justice to both sides in that great conflict which dis- 
united the English-speaking races. In " The Pilot " we 
have a somewhat similar state of things; but here, instead of 
laying the scene on American soil. Cooper lays it for the first 
time in literature aboard an American ship. " The Pilot " is 
very uneven. The plot is conventionally trivial ; and most of 
the characters are more so still. But Long Tom Coffin is a 
living Yankee sailor ; and when we come to the sea, with 
its endless variety of weather, and to sea-fights, such as that 
between the " Ariel " and the " Alacrity," it is hardly ex- 
cessive to say that there is little better in print. If the plot 
and the characters had been half so good as the wonderful 
marine background in which they are set, the book would have 
been a masterpiece. 

Something similar may be said of the Leather-Stocking 
stories, of which " The Last of the Mohicans," published in 
1826, is probably the best. The trivially conventional plots 
concern characters not particularly like anything recorded in 
human history. Lowell's comment on them in the " Fable 
for Critics " is not unfair ; after declaring Natty Bumppo 
vital enough to be named in the same breath with Parson 



1 86 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-1837 

Adams, and doing surprisingly scant justice to Long Tom 
Coffin, he proceeds thus : — 

"All his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks, 
The derniere chemise of a man in a fix, 
(As a captain besieged, when his garrison 's small, 
Sets up caps upon poles to be seen o'er the wall) ; 
And the women he draws from one model don't vary, 
All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie. 
When a character 's wanted, he goes to the task 
As a cooper would do in composing a cask ; 
He picks out the staves, of their quahties heedful. 
Just hoops them together as tight as is needful. 
And, if the best fortune should crown the attempt, he 
Has made at the most something wooden and empty." 

Cooper's noble Indians, in fact, are rather more like the 
dreams of eighteenth-century France concerning aboriginal 
human nature than anything critically observed by ethnology ; 
and Natty Bumppo himself is a creature rather of romantic 
fancy than of creative sympathy vv^ith human nature. The 
vt^oods and the inland waters, on the other hand, amid which 
the scenes of these stories unroll themselves, are true American 
forests and lakes and streams. It is hardly too much to say 
that Cooper introduced to human recognition certain aspects 
of Nature unknown to literature before his time, and of a kind 
which could have been perceived and set forth only by an 
enthusiastic native of that newest of nations to which he was 
so devotedly attached. 

For, in spite of his later quarrels with his countrymen, 
Cooper was an intensely patriotic American. He chanced, 
however, to be of a temper not generally characteristic of 
our country, and partly to be accounted for by his personal 
origin. His father had been something like a feudal lord in 
the savage country where Cooper's boyhood was passed ; 
and the son could not help inheriting a certain instinct of per- 
sonal superiority, or at least of personal independence, pecu- 
liarly foreign to that sensitive consciousness of majorities which 



COOPER 187 

has often made Americans so slow to express unpopular opin^ 
ions. Cooper, too, had strong prejudices ; and when brought 
face to face with anything he did not like, he was given to 
expressing disapprobation with a vigour more characteristic 
of the English than of ourselves. Though he thoroughly 
loved his country, he saw in it traits which by no means 
delighted him. So in his " Notions of the Americans Picked 
up by a Travelling Bachelor," published in 1828, when his 
popularity was at its height, he expressed concerning our 
countrymen views which may be summarised in the statement 
that Americans, though full of energy and other admirable 
qualities, have a blind passion for money-seeking, an undue 
respect for popular opinion, and an irrepressible tendency to 
brag. For this he was called Anglomaniac ; his Anglo- 
mania did not prevent him from writing just as frankly 
about the English, of whom his published views may similarly 
be summarised in the statement that the English are not only 
the most efficiently powerful nation in the world, but also by 
far the most snobbish. Both nations resented such com- 
ments. Some notion of the amenities of criticisms sixty years 
ago may be gained from a few phrases which were conse- 
quently bestowed upon Cooper both in England and in 
America. In 1838 the "New Yorker" wrote of him as 
follows : " He is as proud of blackguarding as a fishwoman is 
of Billingsgate. It is as natural to him as snarling to a tom- 
cat or growling to a bull-dog. . . . He has the scorn and 
contempt of every well-informed American. The superlative 
dolt." A little later " Eraser's Magazine " called him a " bil- 
ious braggart," a "liar," a "full jackass," an "insect," a 
" grub," and a " reptile." 

The troubles in which he thus involved himself during his 
last twenty years were enhanced not only by those which 
sprang from his honest effort to be fair in his History of the 
Navy, but by quarrels with neighbours at Cooperstown, con- 
cerning the public use of some land to which he held a 



1 85 THE MIDDLE STATES, lygS-iS^y 

clear title, and by various infirmities of temper. Intensely 
aristocratic in personal feeling, he cherished the most democratic 
general sentiments, believing equally in the rights of man and 
in the vileness of any actual populace. In politics he was a 
Democrat, but he hated free trade as blindly as Tory squire 
ever loved the Corn Laws ; and so on. One can begin to 
see why, after what he must have felt to be a lifetime of mis- 
understanding and vexation, he wished no biography of him 
made. 

Yet, after all, now that he has been half a century in his 
grave, little memory is left of his foibles or his troubles. The 
Cooper who persists and who will persist in popular memory 
is the author of those wholesome novels of sea and of forest 
which were the first American writings to win and to keep 
a truly wide popularity. In touching on them a little while 
ago, we remarked the extraordinary truthfulness of their back- 
ground; and this, probably, is the trait which gives them their 
highest positive value. It is hardly to so unusual a quality, 
however, that they have owed their popular vitality. Their 
plots, though conventional, are put together with considerable 
skill. In spite of prolixity one constantly feels curious to know 
what is coming next. In spite even of lifeless characters, this 
skilful handling of plot makes one again and again feel un- 
expected interest concerning what these personages are going 
to do or what is going to happen to them. As we have seen 
already, too, crucial episodes, such as the wreck of the " Ariel " 
in " The Pilot," possess, in spite of careless phrasing, a vivid- 
ness and a bravery sure to appeal to broad human temper. 

Cooper's plots, then, if commonplace, are often interesting 
enough to atone for their prolixity ; and whatever the con- 
ventionality of his characters, the spirit of his books is vigor- 
ously brave and manly. Excellent as these traits are, however, 
they are not specifically American. Another trait of Cooper's 
work, less salient, but just as constant, may fairly be regarded 
as national. From beginning to end of his writings there is 



COOPER 189 

hardly a passage which anybody would hesitate to put into 
the hands of a child or of a young girl j nor is this pervasive 
purity apparently deliberate. The scenes of his novels are 
often laid in very rough places, and as a natural consequence 
many of his characters and incidents are of a rough, adven- 
turous kind ; but, with a freedom from pruriency as instinctive 
as his robustness, the man avoids those phases of rough human 
life which recent " decadence " has generally tended either 
to overemphasise or so studiously to neglect that the neglect 
amounts to emphasis. Cooper's temper was unaffectedly 
pure ; and purity of temper is probably still characteristic of 
American letters. 

Cooper lived until 185 1, and Irving lived eight years longer. 
Both men wrote until they died. In a certain way, then, 
their work might be held to extend to a distinctly later period 
than that in which we are considering them ; for here we 
have treated them as almost contemporary with Brockden 
Brown, who died in 18 10. In another aspect, however, 
they belong very early in the history of American letters. 
In 1798, we remember, the year when Wordsworth and 
Coleridge published the " Lyrical Ballads," appeared also 
Brockden Brown's " Wieland," the first American book 
which has survived. In 1832 the death of Sir Walter Scott 
brought to an end that epoch of English letters which the 
" Lyrical Ballads " may be said to have opened. In that 
year, of course. Brown had long been dead ; and both Irving 
and Cooper had still some years to write. The reputation 
of each, however, was virtually complete. Irving had al- 
ready published his " Knickerbocker History," his " Sketch 
Book," his " Bracebridge Hall," his " Tales of a Traveller," 
his " Life of Columbus," his " Fall of Granada," and his 
"Alhafiibray' nothing later materially increased his reputation. 
Cooper had published " The Spy," " The Pioneers," " The 
Pilot," « Lionel Lincoln," " The Last of the Mohicans," « The 
Prairie," the " Red Rover," the " Wept of Wish-ton- Wish," 



I90 THE MIDDLE STATES, ijgS-iSsy 

" The Water Witch," and the « Bravo." When Scott died, 
then, Cooper, too, had produced enough to make his reputa- 
tion permanent J nothing which he wrote later much en- 
hanced it. 

The three writers whom we have considered — Brockden 
Brown, Irving, and Cooper — were the only Americans who 
between 1798 and 1832 achieved lasting names in prose. 
Though they form no school, though they are very different 
from one another, two or three things may be said of them 
in common. They all developed in the Middle States; the 
names of all are associated with the chief city of that region. 
New York. The most significant work of all assumed a form 
which in the general history of literatures comes not early but 
late, — prose fiction. This form, meantime, happened to be 
on the whole that which was most popular in contemporary 
England. Again, in the previous literature of America, if 
literature it may be called, two serious motives were expressed. 
In the first place, particularly in New England, there was a 
considerable development of theologic thought ; the serious 
Yankee mind was centred on the eternities. A little later, 
partly in New England, but more in Virginia and in New 
York, there was admirable political writing. These two 
motives — the one characteristic of the earliest type of native 
American, the second of that second type which politically 
expressed itself in the American Revolution — may be regarded 
as expressions in this country of the two ideals most deeply 
inherent in our native language, — those of the Bible and of 
the Common Law. Whatever the ultimate significance of 
American writing during the seventeenth or the eighteenth 
centuries, then, such of it as now remains worthy of attention 
is earnest in purpose, dealing either with the eternal destinies 
of mankind or with deep problems of political conduct. In 
our first purely literary expression, on the other hand, a differ- 
ent temper appears. Neither Brown nor Irving nor Cooper 
has left us anything profoundly significant. All three are 



COOPER 191 

properly remembered as writers of wholesome fiction; and the 
object of wholesome fiction is neither to lead men heaven- 
ward nor to teach them how to behave on earth ; it is rather 
to please. There is a commonplace which divides great litera- 
ture into the literature of knowledge, which enlarges the in- 
tellect, and that of power, which stimulates the emotions until 
they become living motives. Such work as Brockden Brown's 
or Irving's or Cooper's can hardly be put in either category. 
Theirs is rather a literature of wholesome pleasure. Nor can 
one long look at them together without tending to the con- 
clusion that the most apt of the forms in which their peculiar 
literature of wholesome pleasure was cast is that short story 
which the American Irving first perfected in English. 

This prose on which we have now touched was the most 
important literature produced in New York, or indeed in 
America, during the period which was marked in England by 
everything between the " Lyrical Ballads " and the death of 
Scott. Even in America, however, the time had its poetry. 
At this we must now glance. 



IV 

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 

In the early summer of 1878 there died at New York, from 
a sunstroke received just after delivering a speech at the un- 
veiling of a monument in Central Park, William Cullen Bry- 
ant, by far the most eminent man of letters in our chief city. 
The circumstances of his death show how thoroughly he re- 
tained his vitality to the end ; and his striking personal ap- 
pearance combined with the extreme physical activity which 
kept him constantly in the streets to make him a familiar local 
figure. To any one who can remember New York twenty- 
five years ago, then, the memory of Bryant must be so vivid 
as to make startHng the truth that if he had lived till now 
he would have been well past his century. 

In his later years the younger generation of Americans who 
were beginning to feel interest in literature had a way of 
rather deriding him. They were told that he was a great 
poet ; and turning to the numerous collections of his works, 
they found little which impressed them as better than respect- 
ably commonplace. The prolonged life of the man, in fact, 
had combined with his unusual physical vitality to make 
people forget that his first published work — a very precocious 
one, to be sure, — had appeared before Brockden Brown died, 
in the same year with Scott's " Marmion ; " and that this re- 
mote 1808 had seen the "Quarterly Review" founded in 
England, and Andover Seminary in Massachusetts. They for- 
got that Bryant's " Thanatopsis," presented to them as the 
work of a contemporary and vigorous man of letters, had been 
printed in 1817, the year in which Byron wrote "Manfred,'' 



BRYANT 193 

in which Jane Austen died, in which Coleridge produced his 
" Biographia Literaria," and Keats the first volume of his 
poems, and Mrs. Shelley her " Frankenstein," and Moore his 
" Lalla Rookh." They forgot that a collected edition of 
Bryant's poems had appeared in 1821, the year when Keats 
died, when the first version of De Quincey's " Opium-Eater " 
came into existence, when Scott published " Kenilworth " and 
the " Pirate," and Shelley " Adonais." And incidentally they 
forgot what Bryant's general bearing rather encouraged them 
to forget, that besides being what he preferred to think him- 
self, a poet, he was the most admirably successful journalist 
whom America has yet produced. For a full half-century he 
was at the head of the New York " Evening Post," which 
brought him the rare reward of a considerable personal fortune 
earned by a newspaper in which from beginning to end the 
editor could feel honest pride. As a journalist, indeed, Bryant 
belongs almost to our own time. As a poet, however, — and 
it is as a poet that we are considering him here, — he belongs 
to the earliest period of our native letters. 

He was born, the son of a country doctor, at Cumming- 
ton, a small town of Western Massachusetts, in 1794. At 
that time a country doctor, though generally poor, was, like 
the minister and the squire, an educated man, and so a person 
of local eminence ; and Dr. Bryant, who was occasionally 
a member of the General Court at Boston, came to have a 
considerable acquaintance among the better sort of people in 
Massachusetts. The son was extremely precocious. When 
he was only thirteen years old, verses of his were printed in a 
country newspaper; and a year later, in 1808, his satire on 
President Jefferson, " The Embargo," was brought to Boston 
by his admiring father and actually published. The only par- 
ticular merit of this poem is accuracy of rhyme and metre, a 
trait of deliberate excellence which Bryant preserved until the 
end. For a year or so the boy went to Williams College, 
but as his father was too poor to keep him there, he soon 

13 



194 THE MIDDLE STATES, 17^8-1837 

entered a lawyer's office. Law, however, proved by no 
means congenial to him; he wanted to be a man of letters. 
In this aspiration his father sympathised ; and when the son 
was twenty-three years of age, the father took to Boston a 
collection of his manuscripts among which was " Thana- 
topsis," already six years old. 

These manuscripts Dr. Bryant submitted to Mr. Willard 
Phillips, one of the three editors of the " North American 
Review," then lately founded. Delighted with the verses, 
Phillips showed them to his colleagues, Mr. Richard Henry 
Dana and Professor Edward Tyrrell Channing. The story 
of the way in which these gentlemen received the poems 
throws light on the condition of American letters in 18 17. 
According to Mr. Parke Godwin's biography of Bryant, 
"they listened attentively to his reading of them, when Dana, 
at the close, remarked with a quiet smile : ' Ah ! Phillips, you 
have been imposed upon ; no one on this side of the Atlantic 
is capable of writing such verses.' " Four years later, in 
1 82 1, Bryant delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of 
Harvard College a poem, " The Ages," which remains his 
longest ; and in the same year he published in pamphlet form 
eight poems. There were only forty-four pages in all ; but 
among the poems were both " The Waterfowl " and " Thana- 
topsis." The life of a country lawyer becoming more and 
more distasteful to him, he determined to move to town. 
He thought seriously of going to Boston, — a city with which 
at that time his affiliations were stronger than with any other ; 
but instead he cast in his lot with New York, to which he 
finally removed in 1825. 

At that time Brockden Brown had been dead for fifteen 
years, and the reputations of Irving and of Cooper were estab- 
lished. At that time, too, there was in New York a consider- 
able literary activity of which the results are now pretty 
generally forgotten. Whoever is curious to know something 
about it may turn to one or two works which may be found 



BRYANT 195 

in any considerable public library. One is Rufus Wilmot 
Griswold's " Poets and Poetry of America," published in 
1842; it was followed within ten years by his " Prose Writ- 
ers of America" and his "Female Poets of America;" and 
in 1856 came the first edition of Evert Augustus Duyckinck's 
" Cyclopedia of American Literature." A comparison of 
these with Stedman and Hutchinson's " Library of American 
Literature " will surprisingly reveal how much has been 
written in this country which even so catholic a taste as that 
of these latest editors has already been compelled to reject. 
Almost the only survival of New York poetry before Bryant 
came there, indeed, is Samuel Woodworth's accidentally pop- 
ular " Old Oaken Bucket." The mere name of James Kirke 
Paulding, to be sure, who was associated with Irving in the 
" Salmagundi Papers," and who subsequently wrote a number 
of novels, and other prose, is still faintly remembered ; and 
so are the names rather than the actual work of two poets, 
Joseph Rodman Drake and Fitz-Greene Halleck. 

Drake, born in 1795, had died in 1820. He was a gentle- 
man and a man of taste. He wrote several pretty things, 
among them a poem published after his death, entitled " The 
Culprit Fay." This conventional tale of some tiny fairies, 
supposed to haunt the Hudson River, is so much better than 
American poetry had previously been that one is at first dis- 
posed to speak of it enthusiastically. An obvious comparison 
puts it in true perspective. Drake's life happened nearly 
to coincide with that of Keats. Both left us only broken 
fragments of what they might have done, had they been 
spared ; but the contrast between these fragments tells afresh 
the story of American letters. Amid the full fervour of 
European experience Keats produced immortal work ; Drake, 
whose whole life was passed amid the national inexperience 
of New York, produced only pretty fancies. When he tried 
heroics he could make no better verses than such as these 
from his poem on " The American Flag " : — 



196 THE MIDDLE STATES, lygS-iSsr 

" When Freedom from her mountain height 
Unfurled her standard to the air, 
She tore the azure robe of night, 

And set the stars of glory there. 
She mingled with its gorgeous dyes, 
The milky baldric of the skies, 
And striped its pure celestial white 
With streakings of the morning light; 
Then from his mansion in the sun 
She called her eagle bearer down. 
And gave into his mighty hand 
The symbol of her chosen land. 



" Flag of the free heart's hope and home ! 

By angel hands to valour given ; 
Thy stars have lit the welkin dome, 

And all thy hues were born in heaven. 
Forever float that standard sheet ! 

Where breathes the foe but falls before us. 
With Freedom's soil beneath our feet, 

And Freedom's banner streaming o'er us ? " 

Fitz-Greene Halleck, five years older, survived Drake by 
forty-seven years. If we except his Campbell-like " Marco 
Bozzaris," however, which was published in 1825, his only 
surviving lines are comprised in the first stanza of his poem on 
the death of Drake, written in 1820: — 

" Green be the turf above thee, 
Friend of my better days ! 
None knew thee but to love thee, 
Nor named thee but to praise." 

In 181 1, Halleck and Drake contributed to the New York 
"Evening Post" a series of poetical satires entitled ^*The 
Croaker Papers;" and Halleck published a mildly satirical 
poem entitled '' Fanny," which may be described as a dilution 
of Byron with Croton water. In 1827 he brought out "Aln- 
wick Castle" and other poems. In 1832 his poetic career 
was virtually closed by his acceptance of a clerical position in 
the employ of Mr. John Jacob Astor. The general insig- 
nificance of New York letters at the time when Bryant first 



BRYANT 197 

came to the town is in no way better typified than by the fact 
that literary work so inconsiderable as Halleck's has been 
deemed worthy of a bronze statue, still sitting cross-legged 
in the Grand Alley of Central Park. 

Compared with such work as this, there is no wonder that 
poems like " Thanatopsis " and " The Waterfowl " seemed to 
the early editors of the " North American Review " too good 
to be native ; and, as we have seen, Bryant's life and activity 
were so prolonged that it is hard to remember how nearly his 
poetical work was accomplished at the beginning of his career. 
It was not all produced at once, of course ; but, as is often 
the case with precocious excellence, — with men, for example, 
like his contemporaries, Landor and Whittier, — even though 
he rarely fell below his own first level, he hardly ever sur- 
passed it. This is clearly seen if we compare the familiar 
concluding lines of " Thanatopsis," written before he was 
twenty-seven, with a passage of about equal length from 
" Among the Trees," published after he was seventy. The 
former lines run thus : — 

"So live, that when thy summons comes to join 
The innumerable caravan, which moves 
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take 
His chamber in the silent halls of death. 
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night. 
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed 
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, 
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch 
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams." 

The latter lines are these : — 

"Ye have no history. I ask in vain 
Who planted on the slope this lofty group 
Of ancient pear-trees that with spring-time burst 
Into such breadth of bloom. One bears a scar 
Where the quick lightning scorched its trunk, yet still 
It feels the breath of Spring, and every May 
Is white with blossoms. Who it was that laid 
Their infant roots in earth, and tenderly 



198 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-1837 

Cherished the delicate sprays, I ask in vain, 
Yet bless the unknown hand to which I owe 
The annual festival of bees, these songs 
Of birds within their leafy screen, these shouts 
Of joy from children gathering up the fruit 
Shaken in August from the willing boughs." 

The former of these passages is the work of an inexperi- 
enced country boy; the latter, by the same hand, is the work 
of an old man who had made a fortune as the most successful 
journalist in New York ; but, so far as internal evidence goes, 
the latter might almost have been written first. Beyond doubt, 
as an American poet Bryant really belongs to the generation 
contemporary with Sir Walter Scott. 

In the year of Scott's death, indeed, the same 1832 which 
saw in England the passage of the Reform Bill and in Amer- 
ica the Nullification Act of South Carolina and President 
Jackson's Bank Veto, Bryant had already been for four years 
at the head of the " Evening Post," and the first considerable 
edition of his poems appeared both in England and in America. 
Nothing which he wrote later, except perhaps his translations, 
— some admirable versions of Spanish lyrics, which are said 
to have attracted many young eyes to fascinating romantic 
vistas, and far later his well-known rendering of Homer — 
will much alter the impression produced by this early 
volume. The lifelong evenness of his work seems to justify 
reference at this point to what he wrote about poetry many 
years later. In 1871 he became editor of a "Library of 
Poetry and Song," — one of those innumerable anthologies 
which are from time to time inflicted on the public, either 
for sale by country book agents or for unacceptable Christ- 
mas presents. To this " library " Bryant contributed an 
introduction in which he stated at considerable length what 
he conceived to be the most important qualities of lasting 
poetry. The trait which on the whole he most valued appears 
to be luminosity : "The best poetry," he says, — "that which 
takes the strongest hold on the general mind, not in one age 



BRYANT 199 

only but in all ages, — is that which is always simple and 
always luminous." 

Simple and luminous Bryant was from beginning to end. 
For this simple luminosity he paid the price of that de- 
liberate coolness which Lowell so pitilessly satirised in the 
"Fable for Critics," of 1848: — 

" There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified, 
As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified, 
Save when by reflection 't is kindled o' nights 
With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights. 
He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation 
(There's no doubt he stands in supreme iceolation), 
Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on, 
But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on, — 
He's too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on; 
Unqualified merits, I '11 grant, if you choose, he has 'em, 
But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm ; 
If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul, 
Like being stirred up with the very North Pole." 

If Bryant's careful attention to luminosity, however, pre- 
vented him from ever being passionate, and gave his work the 
character so often mistaken for commonplace, it never de- 
prived him of tender delicacy. Take, for example, " The 
Death of the Flowers," of which the opening line — 

•' The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year " — 

is among his most familiar. The last two stanzas run as 
follows : — 

"And now, when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will 

come, 
To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home ; 
When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees 

are still, 
And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill. 
The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he 

bore, 
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more. 



200 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-1837 

" And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died, 
The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side. 
In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forests cast the leaf, 
And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief; 
Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours, 
So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers." 

To a generation familiar with all the extravagances of 
nineteenth-centuiy romanticism, a feeling so restrained, so 
close to sentimentality, as this — expressed, too, with such 
deliberate luminosity, — may well seem unimpassioned. But 
one cannot dwell on these lines without feeling genuine sweet- 
ness of temper, or without finally discerning, in what at first 
seems chilly dehberation of phrase, what is rather a loving 
care for every syllable. 

The allusion in the last stanza is to the early death from 
consumption of Bryant's sister. Only a few years before, his 
father had died of the same disease. So he had personal 
reason for melancholy. As one looks through his work, 
however, one is apt to wonder whether, even if his life had 
been destitute of personal bereavement, his verse might not 
still have hovered sentimentally about the dead. His most 
successful poem, " Thanatopsis," was apparently written 
before death had often come near him ; and it is hardly 
excessive to say that if a single name were sought for his 
collected works, from beginning to end, a version of that bar- 
barous Greek title might be found suitable, and the whole 
volume fairly entitled " Glimpses of the Grave." Of course 
he touched on other things ; but he touched on mortality so 
constantly as to make one feel regretfully sure that whenever 
he felt stirred to poetry his fancy started for the Valley of the 
Shadow of Death. In this, of course, he was not peculiar. 
The subject had such fascination for eighteenth-century versi- 
fiers that in 1751 Gray's "Elegy" made of it a master- 
piece; and we need only remember those mortuary memorials 
wherein the hair of the departed is woven into the weeping 
willows of widowed brooches, to be reminded how general 



BRYANT 20I 

this kind of sentimentality has been. This underlying im- 
pulse of Bryant's poetry, however, was most general in the 
eighteenth century j and Bryant's style — distinctly affected 
by that of Cowper, and still more by that of Wordsworth — 
belongs rather to the nineteenth. A contemporary of Irving, 
then, he reverses the relation of substance to style which we 
remarked in Irving's prose. Irving, imbued with nineteenth- 
century romantic temper, wrote in the classical style of the 
century before; Bryant, writing in the simply luminous style 
of his own century, expressed a somewhat formal sentimen- 
tality which had hardly characterised vital work in England 
for fifty years. 

Always simple and always luminous, then, tenderly senti- 
mental, melancholy and sweet, given to commonplace didactic 
moralising and coolly careful metre and rhyme, Bryant, a far 
from prolific poet, had done, when he came to New York at 
the age of thirty-one, as good work as he was ever destined to 
do. In New York he lived for fifty-three years ; and during 
those years most of what is now called American literature 
came into existence. His life, indeed, is really coeval with 
the letters of his countr)'. As a matter of fact, the chief 
development of these letters centred in Boston. Had Bryant 
yielded to his first impulse, and gone not to New York, 
but to the chief city of his native New England, the chances 
are that his eminence would have suffered. In New York, 
however, throughout his residence there, it became clearer and 
clearer that he was not only the most eminent of local journ- 
alists, but also the only resident poet of distinction. That 
accidental word calls to mind a trait which any one who ever 
saw Bryant must remember. Whatever one thought of 
his literary merit, — and the great changes in literary fashion 
which occurred during his lifetime often made his younger 
contemporaries deem him less of a poet than calm reflection 
makes him seem now, — there can be no question that his 
aspect was remarkably distinguished. 



202 THE MIDDLE STATES, 17^8-1857 

Partly, of course, this was a matter of mere personal ap- 
pearance. His firm old features, encircled by a cloud of 
snowy hair and beard, would have impressed anybody ; but 
in the distinction of Bryant's appearance there was some- 
thing more than accident of feature, and something far more 
significant in the history of literary America. One does not 
remember his manner as in the least assertive. Rather to 
those who, without knowing him, saw him at a distance 
his aspect was gentle, kindly, calmly venerable. But it 
had not the simplicity of unconsciousness. Whatever he 
really felt, he looked like a man who felt himself consider- 
able; and certainly the qualities for which he most valued 
himself were not those which as journalist and man of busi- 
ness had made him a man of fortune. The thing for which 
he most respected himself was his work as a poet j and be- 
yond question it was his work as a poet which the public 
most willingly recognised. The distinction he may have felt, 
— the distinction which he certainly received from his con- 
temporaries, and which came to be so embodied in his per- 
sonal appearance, — was wholly due to his achievement as a 
man of letters. 

In this fact there is something characteristic of America at 
the time when Bryant's best work was done. Ours was a 
new country, at last conscious of its national independence. 
It was deeply and sensitively aware that it lacked a literature. 
Whoever produced writings which could be pronounced 
admirable was accordingly regarded by his fellow-citizens as 
a public benefactor, a great public figure, a personage of 
whom the nation should be proud. Bryant, fully recognised 
in early middle life, retained to the end that gracious dis- 
tinction of aspect which comes from the habit of personal 
eminence. 

Such was the eldest of our nineteenth-century poets, the 
first whose work was recognised abroad. In the nature of 
things he has never been widely popular ; and in the course 



BRYANT 203 

of a century whose poetry has been chiefly marked by 
romantic passion, he has tended to seem more and more com- 
monplace. But those of us who used to think him common- 
place forgot his historical significance ; we forgot that his work 
was really the first which proved to England what native 
American poetry might be. The old world was looking for 
some wild manifestation of this new, hardly apprehended, 
western democracy. Instead, what it found in Bryant, the one 
poetic contemporary of Irving and Cooper whose writings have 
lasted, was fastidious over-refinement, tender sentimentality, 
and pervasive luminosity. Refinement, in short, and con- 
scious refinement, groups Bryant with Irving, with Cooper, 
and with Brockden Brown. In its beginning the American 
literature of the nineteenth century was marked rather by 
delicacy than by strength, by palpable consciousness of personal 
distinction rather than by any such outburst of previously 
unphrased emotion as on general principles democracy might 
have been expected to excite. 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

In April, 1846, Edgar Allan Poe published in " Godey's 
Lady's Book" a considerable article on William Cullen 
Bryant. In the six following numbers of the same periodical, 
whose colored fashion-plates are said to have been highly 
acceptable to the contemporary female public, appeared that 
series of comments on the literary personages of the day 
which has been collected under the name of the " Literati." 
The personal career of Poe was so erratic that one can hardly 
group him with any definite literary school. It seenis, how- 
ever, more than accidental that his principal critical work 
concerned the contemporary literature of New York ; and 
though he was born in Boston and passed a good deal of his 
life in Virginia, he spent in New York rather more of his lit- 
erary years than anywhere else. On the whole, then, this 
seems the most fitting place to consider him. 

Erratic his career was from the beginning. His father, the 
son of a Revolutionary soldier, had gone wrong and brought 
up on the stage ; his mother was an English actress of whom 
little is known. The pair, who chanced to be in Boston 
when their son was born, in 1809, died when he was still 
a little child. At the age of two, he was adopted by a 
gentleman of Richmond, Virginia, named Allan, who soon 
took him to Europe, where he remained from 18 15 to 1820. 
In 1826 he was for a year at the University of Virginia, 
where his career was brought to an end by a gambling scrape, 
which in turn brought almost to an end his relations with 
his adopted father. In 1827 his first verses were published, 



POE 205 

a little volume entitled " Tamerlane and Other Poems." 
Then he drifted into the army, and a temporary reconciliation 
'with Mr. Allan got him into the Military Academy at West 
Point, from which in 1831 he managed to get himself dis- 
missed. After that he always lived from hand to mouth, 
supporting himself as a journalist and as a contributor to 
numberless periodicals which flourished in his day and have 
long since disappeared. The unedifying question of his per- 
sonal habits need not seriously concern us. Beyond doubt 
he was occasionally drunk, and he probably took more or 
less opium ; at the same time there is no evidence that he 
was abandoned to habitual excesses. His " Manuscript found 
in a Bottle," published in 1833, procured him for a while 
the editorship of the "Southern Literary Messenger," published 
at Richmond and for many years the most successful literary 
periodical of the South. In 1835 he secretly married a 
charming but penniless girl, a relative of his own ; he married 
her again openly in 1836. In 1839 and 1840 he edited ihe 
"Gentleman's Magazine" in Philadelphia; from 1840 to 
1842 he edited "Graham's Magazine" in New York; his 
general career was that of a literary hack. In 1847, ^^'^^'* ^ 
life of distressing poverty, his wife died ; two years later Poe 
himself died under circumstances which have never been quite 
clear. He had certainly alleviated his widowhood by various 
flirtations, and it is said that he was about to marry again. 
The story goes that he was passing through Baltimore, either 
on his way to see his betrothed or on his way from a visit to 
her. In that city an election was about to take place ; and 
some petty politicians in search of " repeaters " picked him 
up, got him drunk, and made him vote all over town. Hav- 
ing thus exhausted his political usefulness, they left him in the 
gutter from whence he found his way to the hospital, where 
he certainly died. 

Born fifteen years later than Bryant and dead twenty-nine 
years earlier, Poe, now fifty years in his grave, seems to 



206 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-1837 

belong to an earlier period of our letters ; but really, as we 
have seen, Bryant's principal work was done before 1832. 
At that time Poe had published only three volumes of verse ; 
his lasting prose came somewhat later; in fact, the permanent 
work of Poe may be said to coincide with the first twelve 
years of the Victorian epoch. In 1838, the year of "Arthur 
Gordon Pym," Dickens was at work on " Oliver Twist " and 
" Nicholas Nickleby ; " and Carlyle's " French Revolution " 
was a new book. In 1849, when Poe died, Thackeray's 
"Vanity Fair" and the first two volumes of Macaulay's 
" History " had lately appeared ; Dickens was publishing 
"David Copperfield," and Thackeray "Pendennis;" and 
Ruskin brought out his " Seven Lamps of Architecture." 
Had Poe survived to Bryant's years, he would have outlived 
not only Bryant himself, but Emerson and Hawthorne and 
Longfellow and Lowell, and indeed almost every literary con- 
temporary except Holmes. 

The very mention of these names is enough to call to 
mind a distinction between the career of Poe and that of 
almost every other American whose literary reputation has 
survived from the days when he was writing. The men on 
whom we have already touched were socially of the better 
sort, either by birth or by achieved position. So in general 
were the chief men of letters who made the Renaissance of 
New England the most important fact in American literary 
history. Poe, on the other hand, was always a waif and a stray, 
essentially a Bohemian. There was in his nature something 
which made futile the effort of that benevolent Virginian gentle- 
man to adopt him into the gentler social classes of America. 
In his lifetime, then, Poe must have seemed personally inferior 
to most of his eminent contemporaries in American letters. Yet 
now that all are dead, he begins to seem quite as important as 
any. In 1885 Mr. WiUiam Minto, writing of him in the 
" Encyclopedia Britannica," called him " the most interesting 
figure in American hterature." Superlatives, of course, are 



POE 20; 

dangerous ; and Poe's writings could never obtain such gen- 
eral, uncritical popularity as Cooper's ; but, to turn only to the 
bibliography in the last volume of Stedman and Woodberiy's 
admirable edition of Poe, it appears that between 1890 and 
1895 there were at least ten translations from his works into 
various foreign languages, among others Swedish, something 
which looks like Bohemian, Italian, Danish, and South Ameri- 
can Spanish. Certainly among the literary classes of Europe 
no American author has attracted more attention than Poe, 
whose influence still seems extending. 

Fifty years after his death, then, we find his reputation 
familiar throughout the civilised world ; and such a reputation 
obscures the fact that in life the man who has won it was of 
doubtful repute. The accident that his first published work 
bears almost the same name as that of the first tragedy of 
Christopher Marlowe suggests a real analogy. Poe and 
Marlowe alike were men of extraordinary power and of reck- 
less personal habit ; alike they produced work which will al- 
ways enrich the literature of the language in which it was 
written. In their own times, however, neither was an admi- 
rably solitary man of genius ; each was only one of a consider- 
able group of writers, now mostly forgotten but undeniably 
more presentable than the artists whom time has proved 
greater. Both, after troublesome, irregular careers, died 
miserably in public places ; it is only as each has receded into 
tradition that his earthly immortality has become assured. 

The historical position of Poe in American letters can 
be seen by glancing at his already mentioned papers, the 
" Literati." These, we remember, followed in " Godey's 
Lady's Book " on a lengthy criticism of Bryant. It is 
worth while to name the thirty-eight persons, then mostly 
living in New York and certainly contributing to the New 
York periodicals of the moment, whom Poe thought consid- 
erable and interesting enough for notice. Here is the list : 
George Bush, George H. Colton, N. P. Willis, William M. 



208 THE MIDDLE STATES, lygS-iSsf 

Gillespie, Charles F. Briggs, William Kirkland, John W. 
Francis, Anna Cora Mowatt, George B. Cheever, Charles 
Anthon, Ralph Hoyt, Gulian C. Verplanck, Freeman Hunt, 
Piero Maroncelli, Laughton Osborn, Fitz-Greene Halleck, 
Ann S. Stephens, Evert A. Duyckinck, Mary Gove, James 
Aldrich, Thomas Dunn Brovv^n, Henry Cary, Christopher 
Pearse Cranch, Sarah Margaret Fuller, James Lawson, Caro- 
line M. Kirkland, Prosper M. Wetmore, Emma C. Embury, 
Epes Sargent, Frances Sargent Osgood, Lydia M. Child, Eliza- 
beth Bogart, Catherine M. Sedgwick, Lewis Gay lord Clark, 
Anne C. Lynch, Charles Fenno Hoffman, Mary E. Hewitt, 
and Richard Adams Locke. In this list there is one name 
which we have already found worthy of a glance, — that of 
Fitz-Greene Halleck. There is another which we have men- 
tioned, — that of Evert A. Duyckinck. There are two at 
which we shall certainly glance later, — those of N. P. Willis 
and Sarah Margaret Fuller. And there are two or three 
which we may conceivably mention, — those of Mrs. Child, 
of Miss Sedgwick, of Lewis Gaylord Clark, and of Charles 
Fenno Hoffman. The very names of the other " Literati " are 
mostly forgotten : they lived ; they flourished ; they died ; 
and they are so thoroughly buried, some in the pages of 
Griswold or of Duyckinck, that even such generous editors 
as Stedman and Hutchinson have found no room for mention 
of a full sixteen of the thirty-eight. It seems almost cruel to 
disturb the peace of such untroubled, untroublesome dead. 

Our chief reason for recalling these forgotten people 
is not to remind ourselves of what they happened to be pub- 
lishing when Poe's best work was done ; it is rather to point 
out why a considerable part of Poe's best work has itself been 
forgotten. His critical writings, collected in the sixth, seventh, 
and eighth volumes of Stedman and Woodberry's edition of 
his works, are the only ones in which he shows how he could 
deal with actual fact ; and in dealing with actual fact he proved 
himself able. Though some of the facts he dealt with, how- 



POE 209 

ever, were worthy of his pen, — he was among the first, for 
example, to recognise the merit of Tennyson and of Mrs. 
Browning, — most of them in the course of fifty years have 
proved of no human importance. For all this, they existed at 
the moment. Poe was a journalist, who had to write about 
what was in the air ; and he wrote about it so well that in 
certain aspects this critical work seems his best. He dab- 
bled a httle in philosophy, of course, particularly on the 
aesthetic side ; but he had neither the seriousness of nature — 
spiritual insight, one might call it, — which must underlie 
serious philosophising, nor yet the scholarly training which 
must precede lasting, solid thought. What he did possess 
to a rare degree was the temper of an enthusiastic artist, who 
genuinely enjoyed and welcomed whatever in his own art, 
of poetry, he found meritorious. No doubt he was more 
than willing to condemn faults ; whoever remembers any of 
his critical activity, for example, will remember how vigour- 
ously he attacked Longfellow for plagiarism. We ought to 
recall with equal certainty how willingly Poe recognised in 
this same Longfellow those traits which he believed excel- 
lent. Poe's serious writing does not concern the eternities 
as did the elder range of American literature, nor yet does it 
touch on public matters. True or not, indeed, that grotesque 
story of his death typifies his relation to political affairs. 
His critical writing, all the same, deals with questions of 
fine art in a spirit which if sometimes narrow, often dogmatic, 
and never scholarly, is sincere, fearless, and generally eager 
in its impulsive recognition of merit. 

Take, for example, a stray passage from the " Literati," — 
his enthusiastic criticism of Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood, a 
lady whose work never fulfilled the promise which Poe dis- 
cerned in it : — 

"Whatever be her theme, she at once extorts from it its whole 
essentiality of grace. Fanny EUsler has been often lauded : true 
poets have sung her praises; but we look in vain for anything written 

14 



2 10 THE MIDDLE STATES, 17^8-1857 

about her, which so distinctly and vividly paints her to the eye as the 
. . . quatrains which follow : — 

" ' She comes — the spirit of the dance ! 
And but for those large eloquent eyes, 
Where passion speaks in every glance, 
She 'd seem a wanderer from the skies. 

" ' So light that, gazing breathless there / 
Lest the celestial dream should go. 
You ''d think the music in the air 
Waved the fair vision to and fro; 

' ' Or that the melody'' s sweet flow 

Within the radiant creature played, 
And those soft wreathing arms of snow 
And white sylph feet the music made.''^ 



" This is indeed poetry — and of the most unquestionable kind — 
poetry truthful in the proper sense — that is to say, breathing of 
Nature. There is here nothing forced or artificial — no hardly sus- 
tained enthusiasm. The poetess speaks because she feels, and what 
she feels ; but then what she feels is felt only by the truly poetical." 

This passage deserves our attention both as containing an 
unusually good fragment of the long-forgotten poetry produced 
in New York sixty years ago, and as indicating the temper in 
which Poe approached contemporary literature. To his mind 
the only business of a poet was to make things of beauty. 
If in what professed to be poetry he found ugly things, he 
unhesitatingly condemned them ; if he found anything which 
seemed beautiful, nobody could welcome it more eagerly. His 
enthusiasm, indeed, often led him into superlative excess ; in 
the case of these pleasantly pretty lines of Mrs. Osgood's, it 
certainly did so ; but if we neglect the superlatives, we can 
admit that what he felt to be beautiful was at least good, just 
as what he condemned was almost always abominable. How- 
ever meretricious, — and surely there are aspects enough in 
which he seems very meretricious indeed, — Poe really loved 
his art ; and whatever his lack of training, he had a natural, 
instinctive, eager perception of beauty. This, too, he set 
1 The italics are Poe's. 



POE 211 

forth in a style always simple and clear, always free from 
affectation or mannerism, and always marked by a fine sense 
of rhythm. All these merits appear saliently in those portions 
of his work which deal with actual fact. 

When it comes to his philosophical writings, the whole 
thing seems more suspicious. As everybody remembers, 
one of Poe's feats as a journalist was to publish a successful 
hoax concerning the passage of the Atlantic by a balloon, in 
which, along with other persons, the minor novelist, Harrison 
Ainsworth, was said to have journeyed from England to the 
Carolinas. The tendency to humbug typified by this harmless 
journalistic feat was deeply characteristic of Poe. When you 
read such papers as his " Poetic Principles," his " Rationale of 
Verse," or his " Philosophy of Composition," it is hard to feel 
sure that he is not gravely hoaxing you. On the whole, he 
probably was not. In his work of this kind one feels intense 
ingenuity and unlimited scholarly ignorance. One feels, too, 
more and more constantly, that his temper was far from judi- 
cial. The man who would set forth a lastingly serious study 
of poetry must do so with deliberation, weighing all ques- 
tions which present themselves, and arriving at conclusions 
slowly and firmly. It is one thing to delight in what is 
good ; it is quite another critically to understand the reasons 
for such pleasure. The former power is a matter of tempera- 
ment ; the latter is rather one of thoughtful scholarly training. 
The traits which make Poe's occasional criticisms excellent 
are only swiftness of perception and fineness of taste ; these 
are matters not of training but of temperament. 

Temperament, indeed, of a markedly individual kind is 
what gives lasting character and vitality to the tales and the 
poems by which he has become permanently known. Both 
alike are instantly to be distinguished from the critical work at 
which we have glanced by the fact that they never deal with 
actualities, be those actualities of this world or of the next. 
Poe's individual and powerful style, to be sure, full of what 



212 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-18^7 

seems like vividness, constantly produces " that willing sus- 
pension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic 
faith ; " but one has only to glance at the attempts to illustrate 
his work in the excellent edition of Stedman and Woodberry 
to feel the full resurgent rush of suspended disbelief. 

Take, for example, a passage which has been chosen for 
illustration in " The Fall of the House of Usher " : — 

" As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been 
found the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to which the 
speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous 
and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust — but then 
without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure 
of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white 
robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of 
her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and 
reeling to and fro upon the threshold — then, with a low moaning cry, 
fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and, in her violent 
and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a 
victim to the terrors he had anticipated." 

Compare with this the grotesque picture at the beginning of 
the tale in Stedman and Woodberry's volume. The trouble 
is not chiefly that the draughtsman, however skilful, has not 
been gifted with genius, nor yet that he has so far departed 
from the text as to depict a man who has just sprung 
" furiously to his feet " pensively seated in a very uncom- 
fortable armchair; it is rather that fictions even so vivid as 
Usher and the Lady Madeline and the unearthly house of 
their doom are things which no one can translate into visual 
terms without demonstrating their unreality. 

It is just so with Poe's most familiar poems. " The Raven " 
cannot be credibly visualised, any more than the uninspired 
draughtsman who tried to compose a frontispiece for the poem 
could make the lost Lenore anything but ridiculous. The pic- 
ture which illustrates " Annabel Lee," in its attempt at real- 
ism, brings out the trait more clearly still. And take the 
opening stanzas of "Ulalume": — 



POE 213 

*' The skies they were ashen and sober ; 

The leaves they were crisped and sere, 

The leaves they were withering and sere ; 
It was night in the lonesome October 

Of my most immemorial year ; 
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, 

In the misty mid region of Weir : 
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, 

In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. 

" Here once, through an alley Titanic 

Of cypress, I roamed with my soul — 

Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul. 
These were days when my heart was volcanic 

As the scoriae rivers that roll, 

As the lavas that restlessly roll 
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek 

In the ultimate climes of the pole. 
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek 

In the realms of the boreal pole." 

You can hardly read this over without becoming conscious 
of two facts : for all the vividness of impression there is no 
actuality about these images ; and yet there hovers around 
them a mood, a temper, an impalpable but unmistakable quality, 
which could never have emanated from any other human 
being than Edgar Allan Poe. 

This individuality of his is hard to define. One or two 
things about it, however, seem clear. In tales and poems 
alike he is most characteristic when dealing with mysteries ; 
and though to a certain point these mysteries, often horrible, 
are genuinely mysterious, they reveal no trace of spiritual 
insight. They indicate a sense that human perception is 
inexorably limited, but no vital perception of the eternities 
which lie beyond it. Excellent in their way, one cannot but 
feel their way to be melodramatic. The very word " melo- 
dramatic " recalls to us the strolling stage from which Poe 
almost accidentally sprung in that Boston lodging-house ninety 
years ago. From beginning to end his temper had the inex- 
tricable combination of meretriciousness and sincerity which 



214 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-1 8s 7 

marks the temperament of typical actors. Theirs is a strange 
trade, wherein he does best who best shams. At its noblest 
the stage rises into tragedy or broadens into comedy •, but 
in our century it has probably appealed most generally to 
the public when it has assumed its less poetical and more 
characteristic form of melodrama. Poe, at least tempera- 
mentally, seems to have been a melodramatic creature of 
genius. 

For genius he certainly had, and to no small degree in that 
excellent form which has been described as " an infinite 
capacity for taking pains," In his tales, now of melodramatic 
mystery, again of elaborate ingenuity, one feels not only that 
constant power of imagination peculiar to him ; one feels also 
masterly precision of touch. Take, for example, a familiar 
passage from " The Fall of the House of Usher " : — 

" I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve 
which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the excep- 
tion of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perliaps, the 
narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, 
which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his 
performances. But the izxv\^ facility of his impromptus could not be 
so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as 
well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not infrequently 
accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result 
of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I 
have previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of 
the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these rhap- 
sodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly 
impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic cur- 
rent of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, 
a full consciousness, on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty 
reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled ' The 
Haunted Palace,' ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus : — 



" In the greenest of our valleys 
By good angels tenanted. 
Once a fair and stately palace — 
Radiant palace — reared its head. 



POE 215 

In the monarch Thought's dominion, 

It stood there; 
Never seraph spread a pinion 

Over fabric half so fair. 

II 

" Banners yellow, glorious, golden, 

On its roof did float and flow, 
(This — all this — was in the olden 

Time long ago) 
And every gentle air that dallied, 

In that sweet day, 
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid, 

A winged odor went away. 

Ill 

"Wanderers in that happy valley 

Through two luminous windows saw 
Spirits moving musically 

To a lute's well-tuned law. 
Round about a throne where, sitting, 

Porphyrogene, 
In state his glory well befitting, 

The ruler of the realm was seen. 

IV 

*' And all with pearl and ruby glowing 

Was the fair palace door. 
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowingj 

And sparkling evermore, 
A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty 

Was but to sing, 
In voices of surpassing beauty, 

The wit and wisdom of their king. 

V 

" But evil things, in robes of sorrow, 

Assailed the monarch's high estate ; 
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow 
Shall dawn upon him desolate !) 
And round about his home the glory 

That blushed and bloomed 

Is but a dim-remembered story 

Of the old time entombed. 



2i6 THE MIDDLE STATES, 17^8-1837 

~ VI. 

"And travellers now within that valley 

Through the red-litten windows see 
Vast forms that move fantastically 

To a discordant melody ; 
While, like a ghastly rapid river, 

Through the pale door 
A hideous throng rush out forever, 

And laugh — but smile no more." 

Here we chance to have side by side his prose and his verse. 
It is hardly excessive to say that as you read both over and 
over again, particularly if you read aloud, you will feel more 
and more that almost every vowel, every consonant, and more 
surely still every turn of rhythm which places the accent so 
definitely where the writer means it to fall, indicates not only 
a rare sense of form, but unusual technical mastery. 

They indicate more than this, too. Whether the things 
which Poe wished to express were worth his pains is not 
the question. He knew what they were, and he unfeignedly 
wished to express them. He had almost in perfection a power 
more frequently shown by skilful melodramatic actors than by 
men of letters, — the power of assuming an intensely unreal 
mood and of so setting it forth as to make us for the moment 
share it unresistingly. This power one feels perhaps most 
palpably in the peculiar melody of his verse. That " Haunted 
Palace " may be stagey as you like ; but there is something in 
its lyric quality — that quality whereby poetry impalpably but 
unmistakably performs the office best performed by pure 
music — which throws a reader into a mood almost too subtle 
for words. A morbid mood, to be sure, this of Poe's, and 
perhaps a meretricious ; plenty of things may be said against 
it ; but the mood is distinct from any other into which 
literature has taken us. 

A little while ago we reminded ourselves of a certain 
analogy between Poe's career and that of Marlowe, the 
Elizabethan tragic dramatist, who came to his end just as 



POE 217 

Shakspere's serious work was beginning. Between Poe's 
work and Marlowe's there is another analogy which has his- 
torically proved more characteristic of literature in America 
than in England. Marlowe's life, like Poe's, was ugly, sinful, 
and sordid ; yet hardly a line of Marlowe's tragedies is morally 
corrupt. For this, indeed, there was good reason. Marlowe 
chanced to belong to the period when English literature was 
first springing into conscious life, with all the force of un- 
hampered imaginative vitality. In literature, as in human ex- 
istence, a chief grace of normal youth is freedom from such 
baseness as time must make familiar to maturity. In the case 
of Poe a similar contrast between life and work appears. 
Here, however, this normal reason for it did not exist. The 
very fact that Poe's work has been eagerly welcomed by con- 
tinental Europe is evidence enough, if one needed evidence, 
that his temper was such as the cant of the present day calls 
decadent. Now the decadent literature which has prevailed 
in recent England, and far more that which has prevailed 
elsewhere in Europe, is pruriently foul, obscenely alive with 
nameless figures and incidents, and with germ-like suggestions 
of such decay as must permeate a civilisation past its prime. 
In Poe's work, on the other hand, for all the decadent quality 
of his temper, there is a singular cleanness, something which 
for all the thousand errors of his personal life seems like the 
instinctive purity of a child. He is not only free from any 
taint of indecency; he seems remote from fleshliness of 
mental habit. 

In the strenuousness of his artistic conscience we found a 
trait more characteristic of America than of England, — a trait 
which is perhaps involved in the national self-consciousness 
of our country. In this instinctive freedom from lubricity, 
so strongly in contrast with the circumstances of his personal 
career, and yet to all appearances so unaffected, one feels a 
touch still more characteristic of his America. It is allied, 
perhaps, with that freedom from actuality which we have 



2i8. THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-1837 

seen to characterise his most apparently vivid work. The 
world which bred Poe was still a world to whose national life 
we may give the name of inexperience. 

Intensely individual, then, and paradoxically sincere in all 
his histrionic malady of temper, Poe set forth a pecuUar range 
of mysterious though not significant emotion. In the fact 
that this emotion, even though insignificant, was mysterious, is 
a trait which we begin to recognise as characteristically 
American, at least at that moment when American life meant 
something else than profound human experience. There is 
something characteristically American, too, in the fact that 
Poe's work gains its effect from artistic conscience, an ever 
present sense of form. Finally, there is something char- 
acteristically American in Poe's freedom from either conven- 
tional or real fleshly taint. Though Poe's power was great, 
however, his chief merits prove merits of refinement. Even 
through a time so recent as his, refinement of temper, con- 
scientious sense of form, and instinctive neglect of actual 
fact remained the most characteristic traits, if not of Ameri- 
can life, at least of American letters. 



VI 

THE KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL 

In the course of our glances at Poe we had occasion to recog- 
nise the existence of an extensive, though now forgotten, 
periodical literature, — " Godey's Lady's Books," " Southern 
Literary Messengers," " Graham's Magazines," and the 
like, — which carried on the impulse toward periodical publi- 
cation already evident in the time of Brockden Brown. 
Throughout the older regions of America such things sprung 
up, flourished for a little while, and withered, in weed-like 
profusion. A year or two ago. Dr. W. B. Cairns, of the Uni- 
versity of Wisconsin, published an admirable pamphlet, " On 
the Development of American Literature from 1815 to 1833," 
in which this ephemeral phase of it is thoroughly set forth. 
So far as the periodicals were literary, they were intensely 
conventional and sentimental, often in the manner of which 
Mrs. Rowson's once popular novel, " Charlotte Temple," 
may be taken as a comically extravagant example. In brief, 
as Dr. Cairns displays them, they are another proof, if proof 
were needed, of what inevitable luxuriance of insignificant 
waste must accompany any period of artistic achievement, 
even when the achievement itself is so far from amazing as 
was that of America during the years now in question. 

In 1833, the year when Dr. Cairns brings his study to a 
close, there was founded in New York the magazine in 
which this phase of literary activity may be said to have cul- 
minated. This " Knickerbocker Magazine," then, deserves 
more attention than its positive merit would warrant. It was 
founded the year after Bryant brought out the first consider- 



220 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-1837 

able collection of his poems, — that 1832 which was marked 
in English history by the Reform Bill and in English litera- 
ture by the death of Scott. The chief founder of the 
" Knickerbocker Magazine " is said to have been Charles 
Fenno Hoffman, a gentleman of New York whom Poe 
recorded among the Literati of 1846, who published a num- 
ber of novels and poems, and whose career sadly closed with 
an insanity which, beginning in 1849, ''^^P*^ h™ fo^ ^ f"ll 
thirty-five years in the seclusion where he died. During its 
thirty years or so of existence the " Knickerbocker Magazine " 
became not only the most conspicuous, but also the oldest 
periodical of its class in the United States. Though Poe's 
Literati were not all contributors to it, their names fairly 
typify the general character of its staff, toward the end of 
the 40's. 

In 1854 its editor was a gentleman named Lewis Gaylord 
Clark, whose actual contributions to literature were not im- 
portant enough to have been found worthy of a place in Sted- 
man and Hutchinson's generously comprehensive "Library." 
He had a slightly more eminent twin-brother, Willis Gaylord 
Clark, who died young ; Stedman and Hutchinson print one 
of the latter's poems, " A Witch Song," of which masterpiece 
of the Clark genius the following stanza may give an adequate 
notion : — 

" Our boat is strong, its oars are good, 

Of charnel bones its ribs are made; 
From coffins old we carved the wood 

Beneath the gloomy cypress shade ; 
An ignis-fatuus lights the prow, — 

It is a felon's blood-shot e'e, 
And it shineth forth from his skeleton brow 

To light our way o'er the Hexen Zee." 

As the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the 
magazine was approaching, somebody proposed that " the 
surviving writers for the ' Knickerbocker ' should each furn- 
ish, gratuitously, an article, and that the collection should be 



THE KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL 221 

published in a volume of tasteful elegance, of which the en- 
tire proceeds should be devoted to the building, on the margin 
of the Hudson, of a cottage, suitable for the home of a man 
of letters, who, like Mr. Clark, is also a lover of rural life." 
The book, which is entitled the " Knickerbocker Gallery," 
was published early in 1855. 

In general aspect it is a rather comical relic of obsolete 
taste. It is a fat volume of about five hundred gilt-edged 
pages, bound in some imitation of morocco, heavily overlaid 
with gilt roses and conventional designs. In the middle of 
the cover is a rough image of the proposed Knickerbocker 
cottage, a pseudo-Gothic structure with a regular American 
piazza, almost heraldically supported on either side by a small 
tree, one apparently a pine, the other perhaps a maple, and 
neither quite reaching to the second-story windows. The in- 
terior of the book corresponds with its inviting external aspect. 
There are fifty-five contributions by fifty-four separate men of 
letters. For some reason which does not appear, no women 
seem to have been invited to co-operate in the benevolent 
scheme. In general, the contributions are such as pervaded 
the sentimental annuals and gift-books which during the second 
quarter of the nineteenth century delighted the reading public 
in England and in America alike. Forty-seven of the articles 
are enriched by portraits of the writers engraved on steel. The 
most characteristic of these is perhaps a gently smirking vignette 
of Bryant, whose chin beard, shaven upper lip, and poetically 
bald forehead, dividing unkempt locks, emerge from the broad 
velvet collar of a much befrogged dressing-gown. Among 
the faces thus immortalised was that of Irving, whose portrait 
is taken not from a daguerreotype, but from a togaed bust by 
Ball Hughes. He contributed some notes from a common- 
place book of the year 1821. Bryant sent some verses on 
" A Snow Shower ; " and Halleck a poetical " Epistle to 
Clark." There are also contributions from several duly 
portrayed literary men of New England : Holmes sent a 



222 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-1857 

four-page poem entitled "A Vision of the Housatonic ; " 
Fields sent an " Invitation to our Cottage Home," in six- 
teen lines of innocent blank verse ; Longfellow contrib- 
uted a poem, " On the Emperor's Bird's Nest ; " and Lovi^ell, 
whose portrait does not appear, sent his verse on " Massac- 
cio's Paintings in the Brancacci Chapel " at Florence. The 
other contributors were mostly either resident in New York 
or closely associated with that city. At least three, Mr. Don- 
ald Grant Mitchell, Mr. Charles Godfrey Leland, and Mr. 
Richard Henry Stoddard, are still surviving and writing in 
the year 1900. The remainder may be taken as fairly typical 
of that phase in the letters of New York which has sometimes 
been called the Knickerbocker School. Some of their names 
have survived j those, for example, of George Henry Boker, 
of Bayard Taylor, of John G. Saxe, of Henry Theodore 
Tuckerman, of George William Curtis, and — an unex- 
pected person to find in such company — of William H. 
Seward. Many of their names are completely forgotten ; 
those, for example, of William Pitt Palmer, John W. Francis, 
Thomas Ward, J. L. McConnell, Alfred B. Street, and more. 
Of all the names and faces in the book, the most characteristic 
of the literary period which produced it in New York are 
those of Nathaniel Parker Willis. 

In the Riverside edition of Lowell's " Fable for Critics," 
a poem originally published seven years before the " Knicker- 
bocker Gallery," when Wilhs was at the height of his popu- 
larity, there are two full pages of tripping verses which 
characterise Willis admirably. And in the paper entitled 
"The New Portfolio," with which in 1885 Dr. Holmes 
opened his "Mortal Antipathy," is a less familiar passage 
about Willis, worth reading in full: — 

" Nathaniel Parker Willis was in full bloom when I opened my 
first Portfolio. He had made himself known by his religious poetry, 
published in his father's paper, I think, and signed ' Roy.' He had 
started the 'American Magazine,' afterwards merged into the 'New 



THE KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL 223 

York Mirror.' He had then left off writing scripture pieces, and 
taken to lighter forms of verse. He had just written 

" ' I 'm twenty-two, I 'm twenty-two, — 
They idly give me joy, 
As if I should be glad to know 
That I was less a boy.* 

" He was young, therefore, and already famous. He came very near 
being very handsome. He was tall; his hair, of light brown colour, 
waved in luxuriant abundance ; his cheek was as rosy as if it had 
been painted to show behind the footlights ; he dressed with artistic 
elegance. He was something between a remembrance of Count 
D'Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde. There used to be in 
the gallery of the Luxembourg a picture of Hippolytus and Phaedra, 
in which the beautiful young man, who had kindled a passion in the 
heart of his wicked step-mother, always reminded me of Willis, in 
spite of the shortcomings of the living face as compared with the 
ideal. The painted youth is still blooming on the canvas, but the 
fresh-cheeked, jaunty young author of the year 1830 has long faded 
out of human sight. I took the leaves which lie before me as I 
write, from his coffin, as it lay just outside the door of St. Paul's 
Church, on a sad, overclouded winter's day, in the year 1867. At 
that earlier time, Willis was by far the most prominent young Ameri- 
can author." 

When the " Knickerbocker Gallery " appeared, Willis was 
so ill that he could contribute only a jaunty apology, of which 
the closing sentence is typical : — 

Well, success to you ! — only don't be so prosperous as to stagger 
our faith in your other deservings — and among those who will " take 
stock " in you (as long as you continue " well-requited ") put me 
down for a share or two, and believe me. 

Yours truly, N. P. Willis. 

In fact, he was approaching the laborious and melancholy 
end of a career whose earlier phases had been full of care- 
less gaiety. He was born at Portland, Maine, in 1807. 
His father, a professional journalist, was an ardent mem- 
ber of the old Congregational communion to which the dia- 
lect of New England long gave the name of " orthodox." 
When the son was a mere boy, the father removed to Boston, 



224 THE MIDDLE STATES, lygS-iSj? 

where he ultimately founded that remarkably successful chil- 
dren's paper, — now circulating by hundreds of thousands, — 
the " Youth's Companion." A more significant fact to his 
son was that the godly old gentleman became a deacon of 
the Park Street Church. As we shall see later, this office 
involved social isolation. In Boston, Unitarianism had swept 
away the pristine religious traditions. Among the older 
churches only the Old South had stuck by its original Cal- 
vinistic colours, and its members generally remained orthodox 
at the expense of their visiting lists. The Park Street Church, 
still so conspicuous from Boston Common, had been founded 
as a new citadel of Calvinism ; and it had maintained its 
principles so bravely as to win for itself in local slang the 
hardly yet forgotten name of " Brimstone Corner." In the 
Boston of Willis's youth, then, its members were socially in 
a position similar to that of contemporary English Dissenters. 
They are said to have consoled themselves, as indeed orthodox 
Yankees sometimes do still, by thoughts of what would hap- 
pen beyond the grave to the triumphant religious liberals who 
on earth rarely invited them to dinner. 

Born and bred amid such surroundings as this, Willis, 
whose temper was among the most frivolously adventurous 
of his time, began life in a state of edifying religious con- 
viction. He was sent to school at that stronghold of ortho- 
doxy, Andover, which was still trying to defend the old 
faith so completely routed by Unitarianism at Harvard Col- 
lege. From Andover, instead of going to Harvard — in 
orthodox opinion the gate of the broad road to perdition — he 
was sent to complete the salvation of his soul at Yale. At 
the prayer meetings which refreshed school-boy life at Ando- 
ver, he had displayed unusual gifts of exhortation. The 
creative powers thus evinced found later expression in diluted 
narrative poetry which dealt with Old Testament stories 
in a temper somewhat like that of Leigh Hunt, and which 
is said long to have remained among the favourite edifications 



THE KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL 225 

of devout old persons in New England. But even Yale 
orthodoxy failed to keep Willis within the fold. He was 
handsome ; women, particularly older than he, were apt to fall 
in love with him. He had an instinctive aptitude for gaiety, 
and when he came back to Boston from college, this son of a 
Park Street deacon was the most elaborate fop who had ever 
been seen on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. In spite of 
considerable religious backsliding, however, he was unable in 
Boston to overcome the social traditions which kept his family 
apart from fashion. He tried a little editorial work there, 
with small success ; and he ended by quitting the town in 
disgust, hating it for life, and returning only for burial nearly 
forty years later. 

In New York he found things more to his taste. Before 
1831 he had become associated with one George P. Morris, 
— now remembered only as the author of a once popular sen- 
timental poem beginning " Woodman, spare that tree," — in 
the conduct of a periodical called the New York " Mirror." 
Between them they hit upon a plan of sending Willis abroad, 
from whence he should write regular European letters ; so to 
Europe he went at the age of twenty-five. His career there 
for the next five years seems incredible. His pecuniary 
resources are said to have been limited to ten dollars a week, 
which Morris agreed to send him ; so, of course, he never 
really knew how his bills were to be paid. But he somehow 
got letters of introduction ; he managed nominally to attach 
himself to an American legation ; and, before long, there was 
little fashionable society in Europe where he was not cordially 
and even intimately received. When toward the end of his 
stay abroad he went to Dublin, it is recorded that he took to 
the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland a letter of introduction from a 
near relative of that functionary, who described him as an 
eminent young American likely to attain the Presidency. 
Soon afterward he married an English heiress, daughter of a 
general in the army, to whom his financial condition was per 

15 



226 THE MIDDLE STATES, lygS-iS^y 

fectly well known. Meanwhile he supported himself by 
regular correspondence with the New York " Mirror." His 
letters are better than tradition has represented them. At least 
in New England, people have been apt to fancy that Willis 
forced his way on false pretences into European society, and 
then wrote home for publication no end of things which came 
to his knowledge in private, and which ought to have been 
recorded, if at all, only in posthumously printed diaries. In 
this charge there is a grain of truth ; but whoever will read 
Wilhs's letters must feel that although in his day there may 
have been a certain impropriety in publishing any record of 
private life, he wrote not only pleasantly, but with tactful 
good-humour. Superficial as you like, his letters are vivid, 
animated, and carefully reticent of anything which might 
justly have displeased the persons concerned. If personal 
journalism is ever to be tolerated, Willis's may be taken as a 
model of it. 

The circumstances of his later career need not be detailed. 
In brief as set forth in Professor Beers's biography of him, 
they were constantly more to his credit. His first wife died, 
and he married again. He got into various money troubles, 
and he worked unremittingly to support himself and his family 
honourably, until the disease came upon him which ended his 
life at the age of sixty-one. By that time the literary fashion 
which he exemplified was generally outworn j but the " Home 
Journal," which he founded, continues to this day its weekly 
career of chatty personal journalism. 

In Willis's palmy days, he was the most popular American 
writer out of New England. He dashed off all sorts of things 
with great ease, — not only such descriptions of life and people 
as formed the staple of his contributions to the " Mirror," but 
poems and stories, and whatever else belongs to occasional 
periodical writmg. Throughout, his prose style had the pro- 
voking kind of jaunty triviality evident in the little sentence 
which closed his letter to Clark for the " Knickerbocker Gal- 



THE KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL 227 

lery." The following poem is perhaps his highest achieve- 
ment in serious verse : — 

"UNSEEN SPIRITS. 

" The shadows lay along Broadway, 

'T was near the twilight-tide — 
And slowly there a lady fair 

Was walking in her pride. 
Alone walked she; but, viewlessly, 

Walked spirits at her side. 

" Peace charmed the street beneath her feet, 

And Honour charmed the air ; 
And all astir looked kind on her, 

And called her good as fair — 
For all God ever gave to her, 

She kept with chary care. 

*' She kept with care her beauties rare, 

From lovers warm and true. 
For her heart was cold to all but gold, 

And the rich came not to woo — 
But honoured well are charms to sell 

If priests the selling do. 

"Now walking there was one more fair — 

A slight girl, lily-pale; 
And she had unseen company 

To make the spirit quail; 
'Twixt Want and Scorn she walked forlorn, 

And nothing could avail. 

" No mercy now can clear her brow 

For this world's peace to pray ; 
For, as love's wild prayer dissolved in air. 

Her woman's heart gave way ! — 
But the sin forgiven by Christ in heaven 

By man is cursed alway ! " 

Work so slight may seem hardly worth emphasis. As time 
passes, however, Willis appears more and more the most char- 
acteristic New York man of letters after the year 1832, — 
the most typical of the school which flourished throughout 
the career of the " Knickerbocker Magazine." The earlier 



228 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-1837 

writers whom we have considered were all imitative, or at least 
their work seems reminiscent. Brockden Brown is reminis- 
cent of Godwin, Irving of Goldsmith, Cooper of Scott, 
Bryant of Cowper and Wordsworth, and so on. In a similar 
way Willis may be said to remind one of Leigh Hunt, and 
perhaps here and there of Benjamin Disraeli, and Bulwer. 
The contrast of these last names with those of the earlier 
models tells the story. As men of letters, Godwin and Gold- 
smith and Scott and Cowper and Wordsworth are distinctly 
more important than Bulwer and Disraeli and Leigh Hunt. 
The merits of the former group are solid ; those of the latter 
are meretricious ; and when you undertake to dilute Leigh 
Hunt and Disraeli and Bulwer with Croton water, you get a 
stimulant hardly strong enough sensibly to affect heads sea- 
soned to draughts of sound old literature. As a descriptive 
journalist, Willis did work which is still worth reading. His 
letters from abroad give pleasant and vivid pictures of European 
life in the 30's ; his letters " from Under a Bridge " give pleas- 
ant pictures of country life in our Middle States a little later ; 
but when it comes to anything like literature, one can hardly 
avoid the conviction that he had nothing to say. 

In the work of the earlier New York school, and even in 
the work of Poe, we have already remarked, nothing was 
produced which touched seriously on either God's eternities 
or the practical conduct of life in the United States. The 
literature of Brockden Brown, of Irving, of Cooper, and of 
Poe is only a literature of pleasure, possessing, so far as it has 
excellence at all, only the excellence of conscientious refine- 
ment. Willis, too, so far as his work may be called litera- 
ture, made nothing higher than literature of pleasure ; and 
for all the bravery with which he worked throughout his 
later life, one cannot help feeling in his writings, as well 
as in some of the social records of his earlier years, a palpable 
falsity of taste. He was a man of far wider social experience 
than Bryant or Cooper, probably indeed than Irving him- 



THE KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL 229 

self; and those who personally knew him remember him, as 
Dr. Holmes did, pleasantly and kindly. Yet, after all, one 
feels in him rather the quality of a dashing adventurer, of 
an amiably honourable Bohemian, than such secure sense of 
personal distinction as marked Bryant and Irving and their 
contemporaries in New England. A school of letters in 
which a man of Willis's quality could attain the eminence 
which for years made him conspicuous was certainly declining. 
The " Knickerbocker Magazine," which came to an £nd 
in 1864, began to fade about 1857. In that year the "At- 
lantic Monthly " was started in Boston, and in New York 
*' Harper's Weekly." Both persist ; this date, then, two 
years after the " Knickerbocker Gallery " was published, is a 
convenient one at which to close our first survey of the litera- 
ture produced in the Middle States. There are certain names 
which we might have mentioned ; Mrs. Kirkland, for example, 
whom Poe records among the Literati, wrote some sketches 
of life in the Middle West which are still vivid, and although 
of slight positive merit, decidedly interesting as history. 
Hermann Melville, with his books about the South Seas, 
which Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have declared the 
best ever written, and with his novels of maritime adventure, 
began a career of literary promise, which never came to 
fruition. Certain writers, too, who reached maturity later 
had already male themselves known, — Bayard Taylor, for 
example, and George William Curtis ; and in regular journal- 
ism Horace Greeley had made the " New York Tribune " 
already a strong and important ally of the reforms which 
were strenuously declaring themselves in New England. But 
certainly between 1833 and 1857 ^^ "Tribune," even with 
Margaret Fuller and later with George Ripley as its literary 
critics, had not in New York perspective such characteristic 
importance as had the " Knickerbocker Magazine." What 
the " Tribune " stood for, was rather an offshoot of some 
New England energies which we shall consider later. 



230 THE MIDDLE STATES, 1798-1837 

The truth is, that the school of letters which began in 1798 
with the work of Brockden Brown and persisted throughout 
the lifetime of Sir Walter Scott in the writings of Irving, 
of Cooper, and of Bryant, never dealt with deeply significant 
matters. Almost from the time when Bryant first collected 
his poems, the literature made in New York and under its 
influence became less and less important. New York news- 
papers, to be sure, of which the best examples are the " Even- 
ing Post " and the " Tribune," were steadily gaining in 
merit and influence; but literature pure and simple was not. 
If we may hold Poe to have belonged to the general phase 
of American literary activity which we have been consider- 
ing, — the only phase which during the first half of the 
nineteenth century developed itself outside of New England, 
— we may say that this literary activity reached its acme in 
the work of Poe, itself for all its merit not deeply significant. 
And even in Poe's time, and still more surely a little later, 
the literature of which he proves the most important master 
declined into such good-humoured trivialities as one finds in 
the " Knickerbocker Gallery " and in the life and work of 
Willis. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact, 
the literary impulse of the Middle States had proved abor- 
tive. For the serious literature of America we must revert 
to New England. 



BOOK V 

THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW 
ENGLAND 



BOOK V 
THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

I 

SOME GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW ENGLAND 

From the time, shortly after 1720, when Franklin left Boston, 
where Increase and Cotton Mather were still preaching, we 
have paid little attention to that part of the country. For 
during the seventy-two years which intervened between Cot- 
ton Mather's death and the nineteenth century, Boston was 
of less literary importance than it was before or than it has 
been since. To understand its revival, we must call to 
mind a little more particularly some general characteristics of 
New England. 

A glance at any map will show that Boston, whose geo- 
graphical position has obviously made it the principal city of 
that region, may be distinguished from most American cities 
by the fact that, comparatively speaking, it is not on the way 
anywhere. The main line of travel from abroad to-day 
comes to the port of New York. People bound thence for 
Washington proceed through Philadelphia and Baltimore ; 
people bound westward are pretty sure to tend toward 
Chicago ; people going southwest pass through St. Louis 
or New Orleans; people going around the world generally 
sail from San Francisco ; but the only people who are apt 
to make the excursion from New York to Boston and return 
are those who do so on purpose. Of course, the ease of in- 
tercommunication nowadays combines with several other 
causes to disguise this isolation of the capital city of New 



234 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

England. All the same, an isolation, socially palpable to any 
one who lives there, really characterises not only the city, but 
the whole region of which it is the natural centre. 

This physical isolation was somewhat less pronounced when 
the English-speaking settlements in America were confined 
to the fringe of colonies along the Atlantic seaboard. Even 
then, however, a man proceeding by land from Boston to 
Philadelphia had to pass through New York; and so one 
proceeding from New York to Virginia or the Carolinas had 
to pass through Philadelphia ; but the only people who needed 
to visit Boston were people bound thither. It had happened, 
meanwhile, that the regions of Eastern Massachusetts, al- 
though not literally the first American colonies to be settled, 
were probably the first to be politically and socially developed. 
Sewall's " Diary," for example, is an artless record of busy 
life in and about Boston, from 1674 to 1729. In spite of 
the many archaic passages which make it so quaintly vivid, 
it has i^w^ more remarkable traits than the fact that the sur- 
roundings and in many respects the society which it represents 
are hardly yet unfamiliar to people born and bred in Eastern 
New England. 

In the first place, the whole country from the Piscataqua 
to Cape Cod, and westward to the Connecticut River, was 
almost as settled as it is to-day. Many towns of Sewall's 
time, to be sure, have been divided into smaller ones ; but the 
name and the local organisation of almost every town of his 
time still persist ; in two hundred years the municipal outlines 
of Massachusetts have undergone hardly more change than 
any equal space of England or of France. In Sewall's time, 
again, the population of this region, though somewhat different 
from that which at present exists, was much like that which 
was lately familiar to anybody who can remember the New 
England country forty years ago. It was homogeneous, and 
so generally native that any inhabitants but born Yankees at- 
tracted attention ; and the separate towns were so distinct 



NEW ENGLAND CHARACTERISTICS 235 

that any one who knew much of the country could probably 
infer from a man's name just where he came from. So iso- 
lated a region, with so indigenous a population, naturally de- 
veloped a pretty rigid social system. 

Tradition has long supposed this system to have been ex- 
tremely democratic, as in some superficial aspects it was. The 
popular forms of local government which were early established, 
the general maintenance of schools in every town at public 
expense, and the fact that almost any respectable trade was 
held a proper occupation for anybody, have gone far to dis- 
guise the truth that from the very settlement of New England 
certain people there have enjoyed an often recognised position of 
social superiority. This Yankee aristocracy, to be sure, has 
never been strictly hereditary ; with almost every generation 
old names have socially vanished and new ones appeared until 
it is now asserted that only one family of Boston has main- 
tained itself without marked vicissitude from the settlement 
of the town to the present day. Until well into the nine- 
teenth century, however, two facts about New England society 
can hardly be questioned : at any given time there was a 
tacitly recognised upper class, whose social eminence was 
sometimes described by the word " quality ; " and although in 
the course of time most families had their ups and downs, the 
changes in this respect were never so swift or so radical as 
materially to alter the general social structure. Names may 
have changed, but not traditions or ideals; and no matter 
how fallen in fortune, people who had once been of good 
stock rarely forgot the fact and rarely suffered it to be 
forgotten. 

In the beginning, as Cotton Mather's old word " theo- 
cracy " asserted, the socially and politically dominant class 
was the clergy. Until 1885, indeed, a relic of this fact 
survived in the Quinquennial Catalogues of Harvard Col- 
lege, where the names of all graduates who became ministers 
were still distinguished by italics. In the same catalogues 



236 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

the names of graduates who became governors or judges, 
or in certain other offices attained public distinction, wqre 
printed in capital letters. These now trivial details indicate 
how the old social hierarchy of New England was based on 
education, public service, and the generally acknowledged 
importance of the ministry. When the mercantile class of 
the eighteenth century grew rich, it enjoyed in Boston a 
similar social distinction, maintained by pretty careful obser- 
vance of the social traditions which by that time had become 
immemorial. And as the growing complexity of society 
in country towns developed the learned professions of law 
and medicine, the squire and the doctor were almost every- 
where recognised as persons of consideration. From the be- 
ginning, meanwhile, there had been in New England two 
other kinds of people, tacitly felt to be of lower rank ; the 
more considerable were those plain folks who, maintaining 
personal respectability, never rose to intellectual or political 
eminence, and never made more than enough money to keep 
decently out of debt ; the other comprised those descendants 
of immigrant servants and the like whose general character 
resembled that of the poor whites of the South. Just as the 
local aristocracy of fifty years ago provided almost every 
Yankee village with its principal people, so this lowest class 
contributed to almost every village a recognised group of 
village drunkards. 

The political forms which governed this isolated popu- 
lation were outwardly democratic ; the most characteristic 
were the town meetings of which so much has been 
written. The population itself, too, was nowhere so large 
as to allow any resident of a given town to be a complete 
stranger to any other; but as the generations passed, the 
force of local tradition slowly, insensibly increased until, 
long before 1800, the structure of New England society had 
become extremely rigid. Sewall, as we have seen, preserves 
an unconscious picture of this society in the closing years of the 



NEW ENGLAND CHARACTERISTICS 237 

seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. In 
more deliberate Hterature there are various more conscious 
pictures of it later. To mention only a few, Mrs. Stowe's 
" Oldtown Folks " gives an admirably vivid account of the 
Norfolk County country about 1800 ; Whittier's "Snow- 
Bound " preserves in " Flemish pictures " the Essex County 
farmers of a few years later ; and Lowell's papers on 
" Cambridge Thirty Years Ago " and on " A Great Public 
Character" — Josiah Quincy — give more stately pictures 
of Middlesex County at about the same time. The inci- 
dental glimpses of life in Jacob Abbott's Rollo Books are 
artlessly true of Yankee life in the 40's ; Miss Lucy Lar- 
com's " New England Girlhood " and Dr. Edward Everett 
Hale's more cursory " New England Boyhood " carry the 
story from a little earlier to a little later. Miss Alcott's 
" Little Women " does for the '6o's what " Rollo " does for 
the '40's. And the admirable tales of Miss Mary Wilkins 
and of Miss Sarah Orne Jewett portray the later New Eng- 
land country in its decline. In all these works, and in the 
many others of which we may take them as typical, you will 
find people of quality familiarly mingling with others, but 
tacitly recognised as socially superior almost like an hereditary 
aristocracy. 

A characteristic example of the family discipline which en- 
sued is preserved in the diary of a Boston merchant who was 
born before the Revolution and died at about the time when 
the " Knickerbocker Gallery " enriched the literature of New 
York. After the good old Yankee fashion, this gentleman 
had a very large family. One of his younger sons had 
fallen out of favour; and five of his elder children, all mar- 
ried and in respectably independent positions, desired to in- 
tercede for their erring brother. They were afraid, it appears, 
to broach the subject in conversation ; so meeting together 
with their husbands and wives, they drew up a paper signed 
by all ten, praying in diplomatically formal terms for 



238 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

parental leniency. This paper was gravely presented without 
comment to the head of 'the family. He received it with 
dignified surprise, and kept it under prayerful consideration for 
a number of days. Finally, having deliberately made up his 
mind that paternal authority must not be questioned even by 
adult children, he sent for the signers one by one, to demand 
that the signatures be separately erased ; and apparently all 
but one of the signers regretfully but dutifully obeyed. 
Doubtless an excessive incident of the patriarchal rigidity of 
New England life about 1830, this is not unique; and it is 
clearly a thing which could have occurred only in a society 
of which the structural traditions were immemorially fixed. 

Such fixity of social structure, developed during two cen- 
turies of geographical and social isolation, could not help 
resulting in characteristic ways of thinking and feeling. 
There can be little doubt that the deepest traits of Yankee 
character had their origin in the intense religious convictions 
of the immigrants. The dominant class of pristine New 
England were the clergy, whose temper so permeated our 
seventeenth-century literature. Their creed was sternly Cal- 
vinistic ; and Calvinism imposes upon whoever accepts it the 
duty of constant, terribly serious self-searching. The question 
before every individual who holds this grim faith is whether 
he can discern within himself the signs which shall prove him 
probably among the elect of God. The one certain sign of 
his regeneration may be found in spontaneous consciousness of 
ability to use his will in accordance with that of God ; in 
other words, the elect, and no one else, can be admitted by 
unmerited divine grace into something like spiritual com- 
munion with God himself. God himself embodies absolute 
right and absolute truth. What the strenuously self-searching 
inner life of serious Yankees aimed to attain, then, was im- 
mutable conviction of absolute truth. 

This it sought under the guidance of a tyrannically domi- 
nant priestly class. Till long after 1800, the orthodox 



NEW ENGLAND CHARACTERISTICS 239 

clergy of New England maintained their formal eminence 
almost unbroken. In every village the settled minister, who 
usually held his office for life, was a man apart ; but he was 
in constant correspondence with his fellows elsewhere. If by 
any chance a New England parson happened to go away 
from home, he naturally put up at the minister's in every 
town where he passed a night. As Dr. Holmes once put 
the case, the Yankee clergy formed something like a Brahmin 
caste, poor in the goods of this world, but autocratic in 
power. 

A fact about them which is often forgotten, however, pro- 
foundly influenced New England life. Once in office, they 
exercised tyrannical authority ; but to exercise this, they had to 
get into office and to stay there. In most parts of the world 
a dominant hierarchy is self-perpetuating : it is the central 
authority of the Roman Church, for example, which appoints 
priests all over the world ; it is the distortion of this system 
effected in England by the Reformation which allows the Eng- 
lish gentry still to nominate the rectors of parishes adjacent to 
their estates. In New England, on the other hand, the con- 
gregations themselves called their ministers from the begin- 
ning, just as they do still. At first, to be sure, the only actual 
members of New England churches were people who had satis- 
fied the clergy that they were probably elect ; but once church 
members, they had a right to choose their minister by majority 
vote. The elect of God, as somebody has phrased it, became 
the electors of God's chosen. So even if the clergy were so 
conspicuously the chosen vessels of the Lord, the members 
of the New England churches may be described as the 
potters by whose hands the Lord was content to see modelled 
the vessels of his choice. 

From this state of things resulted a palpable check on the 
power of the old Yankee ministers. In one aspect they were 
autocratic tyrants ; in another they were subject to the tyran- 
nical power of an irresponsible majority vote. The kind of 



240 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

thing which sometimes resulted has always been familiar in 
America. The first President of Harvard College was com- 
pelled to resign his office because he believed in baptism by 
immersion ; after twenty years of service, Jonathan Edwards 
was deposed from the pulpit of Northampton at the instance 
of a disaffected congregation ; and there were plenty of more 
fleshly troubles which brought about similar results. The 
second John Cotton, for example, the son of the first min- 
ister of Boston and himself minister of Plymouth, was forced 
to leave his pulpit under circumstances which may have sug- 
gested to Hawthorne the story of " The Scarlet Letter," and 
though he asserted his innocence to the end, he died obscurely 
in the Carolinas. If the old New England clergy, in fact, 
felt bound to watch and guard their congregations, whose 
errors they denounced with all the solemnity of divine author- 
ity, the congregations from the beginning returned the com- 
pliment. They watched, they criticised, they denounced errors 
of the clergy almost as strenuously as the clergy watched 
and criticised and denounced theirs. 

One can see why this state of things was unavoidable. 
Sincere Calvinists believed that divine grace vouchsafed only 
to the elect the power of perceiving absolute truth. The 
elect, chosen at God's arbitrary pleasure, might just as prob- 
ably be found among the laity as the unregenerate might be 
found among the clergy. And any mistake anywhere in the 
system was no trivial matter ; it literally meant hell-fire. 
The deepest fact in the personal life of oldest New England, 
then, on the part of clergy and laity alike, was this intensely 
earnest, reciprocally tyrannical, lifelong search for absolute 
truth. 

Toward the period of the American Revolution the mer- 
cantile prosperity of Boston had tended to develop in the 
capital city of New England the social class familiar to us in 
the portraits of Copley ; and their manners were becoming 
superficially like those of their contemporary England. The 



NEW ENGLAND CHARACTERISTICS 241 

Boston gentry of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, 
were a wealthier class, and in closer contact with the old 
world than any had been before their time. In various 
aspects, then, it is probable that the society which Copley 
painted was beginning to lose some characteristic native 
traits. If these were momentarily disappearing from the sur- 
face of fashionable New England life, however, they remained 
a little beneath it in all their pristine force. The literary his- 
tory of the Revolution shows that the arguments of the Tories 
may be distinguished from those of the Revolutionists by a 
pretty sharp line. The temper of that class which the Revo- 
lution overthrew was marked by strong attachment to estab- 
lished forms of law. The temper of that revolutionary party 
which ultimately triumphed was marked, despite respectful 
recognition of legal precedent, by a more instinctive liking 
for absolute right. In this revolutionary attachment to 
absolute right, there is something more analogous to the un- 
questioning faith in absolute truth which marked the ancestral 
Calvinists than we can discern in that respect for law and 
order which had become the dominant sentiment of the 
Tories. However debatable the suggestion may be, then, 
the work of the Revolution In New England sometimes looks 
like the reassertion of the old native type in a society which 
for a little while had seemed to be yielding precedence to 
persons of somewhat more extensive sympathy. 

An accidental fact familiar to people who know Boston will 
illustrate this. Copley painted the Boston gentry of his time. 
Forty or fifty years later the gentry then controlling the destin- 
ies of New England were painted by Gilbert Stuart. Many 
old Boston families still preserve Copley portraits as heir- 
looms; many, too, similarly preserve portraits by Stuart; and 
a familiar passage in the first section of Holmes's " Autocrat 
of the Breakfast Table " describes as among the essential pos- 
sessions of a man of family in Boston portraits by both of 
these masters. Whoever knows modern Boston, however, will 



^ 242 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

be apt to feel that, according to this test, such men of family 
are few. You do not often find Copleys and Stuarts in the 
same dining-room. When you do, one or the other have gen- 
erally got there either by purchase or by intermarriage. The 
Copleys and the Stuarts usually bear different names ; they 
rarely represent direct ancestral lines. A little inquiry will 
generally reveal another fact about them. As likely as not 
the Stuart portraits represent people whose fortunes still per- 
sist ; in general, the Copleys are pathetic survivals of fortunes 
which went down in the general econorriic crash of revolution- 
ary times. For at least in New England the American Rev- 
olution not only shook to its foundations the structure of 
fashionable society, but it so disturbed business that hardly 
anybody was able to pay his debts. The men whom Cop- 
ley painted were mostly ruined by the Revolution ; the men 
whom Stuart painted were those who, as the country sub- 
sided into peace, were able to establish fortunes which have 
lasted. 

This new generation of New England aristocracy, however, 
many of whose leaders were born in the country and came to 
Boston in search of fortune, was in many ways sounder and 
more characteristically native than the generation which it 
supplanted. To speak of it as if it were a commonplace 
lower class which had emerged from a great political convul- 
sion, would be totally to misunderstand the situation. In the 
first place, the men of whom it was composed would have 
been recognised anywhere as remarkably able ; in the second 
place, if generally descended from families for the moment less 
conspicuous than those whom Copley had painted a generation 
earlier, they were generally people who had inherited the sturdi- 
est traditions of New England manhood. Many of them 
could trace descent from the " quality " of a century or so be- 
fore ; and at least until after the Revolution, even the lower 
classes of native New England had never so far departed from 
the general native type as to resemble a European populace 



NEW ENGLAND CHARACTERISTICS 243 

or mob. So the New England gentlemen who came to their 
best when Stuart was painting were mostly people who re- 
tained, in rather more purity than the provincial aristocracy 
which for a while had been more fortunate, the vigorous 
traits of the original native character. Coming to prominence 
and fortune, too, with the growth of our new national life, they 
combined with the vigour of their untired blood a fine flush of 
independence. 

At the same time the society of which they found them- 
selves leaders was one in which fixed traditions had prevailed ; 
and whatever the patriotism of these gentlemen, they were far 
from radical in social temper. Finding themselves in the 
position which before the Revolution had been maintained by 
the people whom Copley painted, they instinctively copied 
many of the best external characteristics of the elder aristoc- 
racy. A petty but significant indication of this tendency 
may be found in their general habit of assuming coats of 
arms. Yankee heraldry has never been punctilious. Long 
before the Revolution people who found themselves prosper- 
ous were apt to adopt armorial bearings, often far from 
grammatical, which are still reverently preserved on silver, 
tombstones and embroidered hatchments. Till well into the 
nineteenth century, this innocent vanity remained a general 
trait of prosperous New Englanders. Just as the new and 
stronger gentry imitated such harmless foibles of their fore- 
runners, too, they imitated their manners. The chief differ- 
ence between the two classes seems to have been a distinct 
improvement in minor morals. The extreme propriety which 
has marked the surface of Boston life since 1800 seems far 
less evident in the records of society there before the Revolution. 
The rise of the gentry whom Stuart painted, in short, meant a 
maintenance of all the better traits of the elder time, together 
with a distinct improvement in vigour among the ruling classes 
of New England, and with a somewhat more rigorous code of 
social conduct. The traditions which come from this period 



244 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

may be a bit priggish ; they are not a bit weak. And the rise 
of this generation to power marked in New England the begin- 
ning of a new era. 

Materially this new era declared itself in several obvious 
ways. The first was a development of foreign commerce, 
particularly with the East Indies. This brought our native 
sailors and merchants into personal contact with every part of 
the world where they could make trade pay. The consequent 
enlargement of the mental horizon of New England was 
almost incalculable. Incidentally this foreign trade helped 
develop that race of seamen which so asserted the naval power 
of the United States in the otherwise ignominious war of i8i2. 
The embargo which preceded that war, and which brought 
into being the first poem of Bryant, considerably diverted the 
more energetic spirits of New England from foreign commerce. 
Before long there ensued that development of manufactures, 
particularly on the Merrimac River, which remains so con- 
spicuous a source of New England wealth. And at just about 
the time when these manufactures were finally established, 
railways at last brought Boston into constant and swift com- 
munication with all parts of the New England country, — 
with Salem and Newburyport, with Fitchburg, with Worcester, 
with Providence, and with various parts of the old Plymouth 
colony. 

For almost two hundred years New England, with its 
intensely serious temper, its rigid social traditions, and its 
instinctive belief in absolute truth, had been not only an iso- 
lated part of the world, but had itself consisted of small isolated 
communities. Now at a moment when, at least relatively, its 
material prosperity was not only greater than ever before, but 
probably greater than it will ever be again, the whole region 
was suddenly flashed into unity. It was during this period 
that Boston produced the most remarkable literary expression 
which has yet declared itself in America. To say that this 
resulted from social and economic causes is too much ; what 



N£W ENGLAND CHARACTERISTICS 245 

can surely be asserted is that the highest development of intel- 
lectual life in New England coincided with its greatest material 
prosperity. From the time when Benjamin Franklin left 
Boston, where Cotton Mather was still preaching, until the 
days when Unitarianism broke out there, while cotton mills 
sprung up on the Merrimac, Boston even in America was 
hardly of the first importance. At this moment it has probably 
ceased to be so. But during the first three quarters of the 
nineteenth century its economic importance was pronounced ; 
and intellectually it was superior to any other city which 
America has yet known. 

What happened there economically and politically, is not 
our immediate business. What does concern us is the intel- 
lectual outburst ; and this, as we shall see, took, on the whole, 
a form which may best be described as renascent. In all sorts 
of intellectual life a new spirit declared itself; but this new 
spirit was more like that which aroused old Italy to a fresh 
sense of civilised antiquity than like a spontaneous manifesta- 
tion of native thought or feeling. In a few years New Eng- 
land developed a considerable political literature, of which the 
height was reached in formal oratory ; it developed a new 
kind of scholarship, of which the height was reached in 
admirable works of history ; in religion it developed Unitarian- 
ism ; in philosophy, Transcendentalism ; in general conduct, 
a tendency toward reform which deeply affected our national 
history ; and meantime it developed the most mature school 
of pure letters which has yet appeared in this country. To 
these various phases of the New England Renaissance we 
may now devote ourselves in turn. 



II 

THE NEW ENGLAND ORATORS 

In the seventeenth century, the literary expression of New 
England had been chiefly theological. In the eighteenth cen- 
tury this expression, at least in the region of Boston, became 
chiefly political and was on the whole less important than 
the political writing produced to the southward. In each case 
the dominant phase of New England expression had been 
decidedly serious, and had been concerned with one of the 
ideals most deeply associated with our ancestral language. 
These ideals we have broadly called those of the Bible and 
of the Common Law ; the former incessantly reminds us that 
we must do right, the latter that we must maintain our rights. 
And they have in common another trait than either their deep 
association with the temper of English-speaking races or their 
pervasive seriousness ; both are generally and most character- 
istically set forth by means of public speaking. 

From the very beginning, then, the appetite for public dis- 
course in New England had been keen. In the seventeenth 
century a minister who preached or prayed well was sure of 
admiration and popularity ; in the eighteenth century a similar 
popularity was the certain reward of a lawyer, too, who dis- 
played oratorical power. Some early records of Yankee 
appetite for oral discourse are surprising : Sewall somewhere 
records, for example, that having begun to pray at a devotional 
meeting, where he lost sight of his hour-glass, he continued an 
unbroken petition to the Lord for something like two hours, 
nor did he remark on the part of his hearers any distracting 
manifestation of fatigue. For two hundred years, Sunday 



THE ORATORS ^ 247 

services in Boston were crowded; and so until well into the 
nineteenth century were the regular Thursday lectures, given 
by various ministers, who often discussed theological subjects, 
but frequently fell to treating public matters from a more or 
less theological point of view. Meanwhile, there were few 
frivolous amusements. Theatres were held in such abhorrence 
that even so lately as 1850 the Boston Museum, whose stock 
company at that time admirably preserved the old traditions of 
the English stage, advertised its auditorium as a lecture-room 
and its performances of standard comedies and farces as 
lectures. Although church-going was a duty, then, and even 
going to the Thursday lectures was represented as something 
of the kind, thare can be little doubt that Boston people felt 
genuine interest in what their preachers and lecturers said to 
them; and until long after 1800 native Yankees had a tra- 
ditional liking, which they honestly believed unaffected, for 
hearing people talk from platforms or pulpits. 

When the Revolution came, accordingly, the surest means 
of attaining eminence in New England was public speaking. 
James Otis, always a man rather of speech than of action, 
began the career which made his name national by his spoken 
argument against Writs of Assistance. The heroic memory of 
Joseph Warren is almost as closely associated with his oration 
at the Old South Church concerning the so-called Boston 
Massacre as with his death at Bunker Hill. Samuel Adams, 
too, is remembered as eloquent ; and John Adams, the founder 
of that family line which to this day preserves its distinction, 
was a skilful public speaker. There is something widely 
characteristic, indeed, in the speech which Webster's eulogy 
of 1826 attributed to this first New England President of the 
United States. The famous " Sink or swim, live or die, 
survive or perish," closely imitates the harangues and speeches 
of classical historians. In each case the speeches may possi- 
bly have been based on some tradition of what was actually 
said ; in each case, obeying the conventional fashion of his 



248 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

time, the writer — Thucydides, Livy, or Webster — puts 
into the mouth of a hero eloquent words which are really 
his own. In each case these words not only characterise the 
personages who are feigned to have uttered them, but as 
elaborately artificial pieces of rhetoric they throw light as 
well both on the men who composed them, and on the public 
for which they were composed. In more than one way, then, 
the speech which Webster's superb fiction of 1826 attributed 
to the John Adams of half a century before illustrates the 
New England oratory of which Adams was one of the first 
exponents and Webster himself the greatest. 

For between the time of Adams's early maturity and Web- 
ster's prime there was a flood of public speaking in New 
England, more and more punctilious and finished in form. 
The name of an eminent Federalist, for one thing, who died 
in 1808 at the age of fifty has been so excellently remembered 
that a Chief Justice of Massachusetts, in a eulogy on a fellow- 
judge who died little more than twenty years ago, declared 
with no intention of anti-climax that " his English was puri- 
fied by constant reading of the greatest models, — the English 
Bible, Shakspere, Addison, and Fisher Ames." And were 
oratory pure literature, and not rather related to the func- 
tions of the pulpit or the bar, one might well give a whole 
volume to the American oratory of the century which followed 
the Revolution. In a study like ours, however, we have time 
only for a glance at it ; and this hasty glance shows clearly 
that its most eminent exponent in New England was Daniel 
Webster. 

Webster's public life is a matter of familiar history. Born 
in 1782, the son of a New Hampshire farmer, he graduated 
at the little country college of Dartmouth. He began his 
legal career in his native State ; but Portsmouth, the chief 
city of New Hampshire, was already declining in importance, 
and before 1820 Webster removed to Boston. At that time 
the material prosperity of New England was well under way. 



THE ORATORS 249 

Webster's active life in Massachusetts coincided with the full 
development of those manufacturing industries on which the 
older Boston fortunes are still generally based. At the head of 
these industries and of other similar activities was that class of 
native Massachusetts gentlemen whom Stuart painted. Be- 
fore long this developed politically into the old Whig party, 
in which was long concentrated the political energy of the 
educated and socially eminent people who for a good while 
controlled Massachusetts politics. Of this party Webster 
soon became the recognised leader, acquiring such power as 
no other political leader of New England has known before 
or since. 

Not the least remarkable phase of this extraordinary 
dominance lies in the fact that Webster was foreign in tem- 
perament to the social class of which he thus became the 
acknowledged chief. The Massachusetts Whigs were Bos- 
ton gentlemen who embodied the general traits at which we 
have glanced. Webster was the son of a New Hampshire 
countryman ; and despite the formal dignity of his manners, his 
character, from their point of view, left something to be de- 
sired. Undoubtedly a man of commanding ability, he was 
with equal certainty a good fellow, robust in personal habits, 
and not very careful of his minor morals ; you could generally 
trust him to win a case, and not to pay a bill. Yet for half 
a lifetime he justly maintained personal leadership amid the 
most severely moral and commercially punctilious aristocracy 
of America. In view of this fact the means by which he 
attained eminence becomes significant. 

For, in the first place, as an advocate at the bar, in the 
second place, as a representative of public sentiment on 
memorable festal occasions, and finally as the most influential 
of American Senators, Webster's means of asserting himself 
remained the same. He had an unsurpassed power of getting 
up before great bodies of his fellow-citizens and talking to 
them in a way which should hold their attention, influence 



250 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

their convictions, and guide their conduct. It is worth our 
while, then, to glance at two or three passages from his 
speeches. 

There is no more familiar example of his occasional oratoiy 
than his Apostrophe to the survivors of the battle of Bunker 
Hill, which occurs in an oration delivered in 1825, when the 
cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument was laid : 

" Venerable men ! you have come down to us from a former gener- 
ation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives, that you 
might behold this joyous day. You are now where you stood fifty 
years ago, this very hour, with your brothers and your neighbours, 
shoulder to shoulder, in the strife for your country. Behold, how 
altered ! The same heavens are indeed over your heads ; the same 
ocean rolls at your feet ; but all else how changed ! You hear now 
no roar of hostile cannon, you see no mixed volumes of smoke and 
flame arising from burning Charlestown. The ground strewed with 
the dead and the dying ; the impetuous charge ; the steady and suc- 
cessful repulse ; the loud call to repeated assault ; the summoning of 
all that is manly to repeated resistance ; a thousand bosoms freely and 
fearlessly bared in an instant to whatever of terror there may be in 
war or death ; — all these you have witnessed, but you witness them no 
more. All is peace. The heights of yonder metropolis, its towers 
and roofs, which you then saw filled with wives and children and 
countrymen in distress and terror, and looking with unutterable emo- 
tions for the issue of the combat, have presented you to-day with the 
sight of its whole happy population, come out to welcome and to greet 
you with a universal jubilee. Yonder proud ships, by a felicity of 
position appropriately lying at the foot of this mount, and seeming 
fondly to cling around it, are not means of annoyance to you, but your 
country's own means of distinction and defence. All is peace ; and 
God has granted you this sight of your country's happiness, ere you 
slumber in the grave. He has allowed you to behold and to partake 
the reward of your patriotic toils ; and he has allowed us, your sons 
and countrymen, to meet you here, and in the name of the present 
generation, in the name of your country, in the name of liberty, to 
thank you ! " 

However impressive you may find such work as this, you can 
hardly avoid feeling it to be elaborately artificial ; and yet its 
artificiality has a ring of genuineness. It comes very near bom- 
bast, but it is not quite bombastic. It does not caricature itself. 



THE ORATORS 251 

Similar traits you may find in Webster's legal arguments, 
such as his description of the murder of Joseph White of 
Salem : — 

" The deed was executed with a degree of self-possession and 
steadiness equal to the wickedness with which it was planned. The 
circumstances now clearly in evidence spread out the whole scene 
before us. Deep sleep had fallen on the destined victim, and on all 
beneath his roof. A healthful old man, to whom sleep was sweet, 
the first sound slumbers of the night held him in their soft but strong 
embrace. The assassin enters, through the window already prepared, 
into an unoccupied apartment. With noiseless foot he paces the 
lonely hall, half-lighted by the moon ; he winds up the ascent of 
the stairs, and reaches the door of the chamber. Of this, he moves 
the lock, by soft and continued pressure, till it turns on its hinges 
without noise; and he enters, and beholds his victim before him. 
The room is uncommonly open to the admission of light. The face 
of the innocent sleeper is turned from the murderer, and the beams 
of the moon, resting on the gray locks of his aged temple, show him 
where to strike. The fatal blow is given ! and the victim passes 
without a struggle or a motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose 
of death ! It is the assassin's purpose to make sure work; and he 
plies the dagger, though it is obvious that life has been destroyed by 
the blow of the bludgeon. He even raises the aged arm, that he may 
not fail in his aim at the heart, and replaces it again over the wounds 
of the poniard ! To finish the picture, he explores the wrist for the 
pulse ! He feels for it, and ascertains that it beats no longer ! It is 
accomplished. The deed is done. He retreats, retraces his steps to 
the window, passes out through it as he came in, and escapes. He 
has done the murder. No eye has seen him, no ear has heard him. 
The secret is his own, and he is safe !" 

It would be hard to find a more vivid description of appal- 
lingly tragic fact ; and the speech of which this formed a part 
carried a Salem jury against the evidence to a morally just 
verdict. As one looks at it, however, after an interval of 
seventy years, one feels along with its consummate skill, an 
artificiality of both conception and phrase, nowadays as for- 
eign to us as a totally foreign language. The words " blud- 
geon " and " poniard," for instance, just as palpably as the 
slip into the historical present tense, instantly betray elaborate, 
though spontaneous, artifice. 



252 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

Just such artificiality and power combine in the famous 
climax of Webster's reply to Hayne, delivered in that same 
1830: — 

" I have not allowed myself, sir, to look beyond the Union, to see 
what might be hidden in the dark recess behind. I have not coolly 
weighed the chances of preserving liberty when the bonds that unite 
us together shall be broken asunder. I have not accustomed myself 
to hang over the precipice of disunion, to see whether, with my short 
sight, I can fathom the depth of the abyss below ; nor could I regard 
him as a safe counsellor in the affairs of this government, whose 
thoughts should be mainly bent on considering, not how the Union 
may be best preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of 
the people when it should be broken up and destroyed. While the 
Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out 
before us, for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to pene- 
trate the veil. God grant that in my day, at least, the curtain may not 
rise ! God grant that on my vision never may be opened what hes 
behind ! When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the la.st time 
the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dis- 
honoured fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, 
discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it 
may be, in fraternal blood ! Let their last feeble and lingering glance 
rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and 
honoured throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and 
trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or pol- 
luted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto, no such miser- 
able interrogatory as ' what is all this worth ? ' nor those other words 
of delusion and folly, ' Liberty first and Union afterwards; ' but every- 
where, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its 
ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every 
wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every 
true American heart, — Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and 
inseparable ! " 

It was such oratory as this, in Congress, in the courts, and 
at all sorts of public meetings alike, which for more than 
thirty years sustained Webster's commanding influence. To 
call it artificial is perhaps a mistake. The man spoke and 
wrote in a way which to him, as well as to the public of his 
time, seemed the only fit one for matters of such dignity as 
those with which he had to deal ; and he wrote and spoke with 



THE ORATORS 253 

a fervid power which any one can recognize. All the same, 
his style is certainly more analogous to Dr. Johnson's pub- 
lished prose than to those idiomatic utterances recorded by 
Boswell which have made Johnson immortal. If Webster's 
power is beyond dispute, so is its essentially histrionic char- 
acter. There used to be a saying that no human being was 
ever really so great as Daniel Webster always looked ; he 
had, in fact, that temperamental tendency to pose which you 
generally find in actors, and often in preachers. And this he 
enforced, in a manner which was thoroughly acceptable to the 
America of his time, by an extremely elaborate rhetoric based 
partly on the parliamentary traditions of eighteenth century 
England, and partly, like those traditions themselves, on the 
classical oratory of Rome and Greece. 

Such highly developed oratory as Webster's is a kind of 
thing which never grows into existence alone. Like Shakspere 
before him, he was only the most eminent member of a school 
which has left many other memories, in their own day of 
almost equal distinction; and the fact that he retained so many 
traces of his far from eminent New Hampshire origin makes 
him somewhat less typical of the Boston orators of his time 
than were some natives of Massachusetts. 

Of these none was more distinguished than Edward Everett. 
Born in 1794, the son of a minister, but not sprung from a 
family which had enjoyed high social consideration before the 
Revolution, he took his degree at Harvard in 181 1, and two 
years later he became for a while minister of the Brattle Street 
Church in Boston. A year or so later, having been appointed 
professor of Greek at Harvard, he went abroad, to prepare 
himself for his academic duties, and was among the earliest 
of American scholars to study at a German university. The 
effect which he produced on his return from Europe has been 
vividly described by Emerson : — 

"There was an influence on the young people from the genius of 
Everett which was almost comparable to that of Pericles in Athens. 



254 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

He had an inspiration which did not go beyond his head, but which 
made him the master of elegance. If any of my readers were at that 
period in Boston or Cambridge, they will easily remember his radiant 
beauty of person, of a classic style, his heavy large eye, marble lids, 
which gave the impression of mass which the slightness of his form 
needed ; sculptured lips ; a voice of such rich tones, such precise and 
perfect utterance, that, although slightly nasal, it was the most mellow 
and beautiful and correct of all the instruments of the time. The 
word that he spoke, in the manner in which he spoke it, became cur- 
rent and classical in New England. He had a great talent for collect- 
ing facts, and for bringing those he had to bear with ingenious felicity 
on the topic of the moment. Let him rise to speak on what occasion 
soever, a fact had always just transpired which composed, with some 
other fact well known to the audience, the most pregnant and happy 
coincidence. . . . In the lecture-room, he abstained from all ornament, 
and pleased himself with the play of detailing erudition in a style of 
perfect simplicity. In the pulpit (for he was then a clergyman) he 
made amends to himself and his auditor for the self-denial of the pro- 
fessor's chair, and, with an infantine simplicity still, of manner, he 
gave the reins to his florid, quaint, and affluent fancy. 

" Then was exhibited all the richness of a rhetoric which we have 
never seen rivalled in this country. Wonderful how memorable were 
words made which were only pleasing pictures, and covered no new or 
vahd thoughts. He abounded in sentences, in wit, in satire, in splen- 
did allusion, in quotation impossible to forget, in daring imagery, in 
parable and even in a sort of defying experiment of his own wit and 
skill in giving an oracular weight to Hebrew or Rabbinical words : . . . 
feats which no man could better accomplish, such was his self-com- 
mand and the security of his manner. All his speech was music, and 
with such variety and invention that the ear was never tired. This 
was a triumph of rhetoric. It was not the intellectual or the moral 
principles which he had to teach. It was not thoughts. But his 
power lay in the magic of form ; it was in the graces of manner ; in a 
new perception of Grecian beauty, to which he had opened our eyes. 
In every public discourse there was nothing left for the indulgence of 
his hearer, no marks of late hours and anxious, unfinished study, but 
the goddess of grace had breathed on the work a last fragrancy and 
glitter." 

If this sketch of Emerson's gives the impression that 
Everett was a mere rhetorician, as distinguished from a man 
of power, the facts of his career should suffice instantly to 
correct it. Among other phases of his later activity, he was 



THE ORATORS 255 

an editor of the " North American Review ; " for ten years he 
was a member of Congress ; for four years he was governor 
of Massachusetts ; for four more he was Minister to Eng- 
land ; he succeeded Webster as Secretary of State ; he was 
president of Harvard College ; he was senator from Massa- 
chusetts ; and in i860 he was nominated for the vice-presidency 
of the United States by the party which bravely tried to avert 
secession. In person he embodied that dignified grace which 
marked the Whig gentry of Massachusetts ; and if his distinc- 
tion of feeling and his formality of manner prevented him at 
once from popularity and from unrestrained fervour of utterance, 
no man of his time has been remembered with more admiration 
or respect. What makes Emerson's sketch noteworthy, then, 
is not so much its critical acuteness as the precision with which 
it reminds us that a career so brilliant and useful as Everett's 
was based on consummate mastery of rhetoric. 

Everett's published works consist of four volumes, entitled 
" Orations and Speeches," beginning with an address before 
the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College on "The 
Circumstances Favourable to the Progress of Literature in 
America," delivered in 1824; ^"^ closing with a brief address 
at Faneuil Hall in aid of a " Subscription to Relieve the Suf- 
fering People of Savannah," delivered on the 9th of January, 
1865, less than a week before his death. Throughout these 
four volumes, comprising the utterances of more than forty 
years, every paragraph seems a studied, masterly work of 
art. Everett's natural feeling was warm and spontaneous ; 
but he had acquired and he unswervingly maintained that 
incessant self-control which his generation held among the 
highest ideals of conduct. So whatever he publicly uttered, 
and still more whatever he suffered himself to print, was delib- 
erately considered to the minutest detail. 

His familiar description of the voyage of the Mayflower, 
from his oration at Plymouth in 1824, will show his oratory in 
its earliest stage : — 



256 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

" Methinks I see it now, that one solitary, adventurous vessel, the 
Mayflower of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future 
state, and bound across the unknown sea. I behold it pursuing, with 
a thousand misgivings, the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Suns rise 
and set, and weeks and months pass, and winter surprises them on the 
deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for shore. I see 
them now, scantily provided with provisions, crowded almost to suffo- 
cation in their ill-stored prison, delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous 
route, and now, driven in fury before the raging tempest, in their 
scarcely seaworthy vessel. The awful voice of the storm howls 
through the rigging. The labouring masts seem straining from their 
base ; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard ; the ship leaps, as it 
were, madly from billow to billow ; the ocean breaks, and settles with 
ingulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening 
weight against the staggered vessel. I see them, escaped from these 
perils, pursuing their all but desperate undertaking, and landed at last, 
after a five months' passage, on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth, weak 
and exhausted from the voyage, poorly armed, scantily provisioned, 
depending on the charity of their ship-master for a draught of beer on 
board, drinking nothing but water on shore, without shelter, without 
means, surrounded by hostile tribes. Shut now the volume of history, 
and tell me on any human probability, what shall be the fate of this 
handful of adventurers. Tell me, man of military science, in how 
many months were they all swept off by the thirty savage tribes enum- 
erated within the boundaries of New England ? Tell me, politician, 
how long did this shadow of a colony, on which your conventions and 
treaties had not smiled, languish on this distant coast ? Students of 
history, compare for me the baffled projects, the deserted settlements, 
the abandoned adventures of other times, and find the parallel of this. 
Was it the winter's storm, beating upon the houseless heads of women 
and children? was it hard labour and spare meals? was it disease? 
was it the tomahawk ? was it the deep malady of a blighted hope, a 
ruined enterprise, and a broken heart, aching in its last moments at 
the recollection of the loved and left, beyond the sea? — was it some 
or all of these united that hurried this forsaken company to their mel- 
ancholy fate ? And is it possible that neither of these causes, that not 
all combined, were able to blast this bud of hope? Is it possible that 
from a beginning so feeble, so frail, so worthy, not so much of admira- 
tion as of pity, there have gone forth a progress so steady, a growth so 
wonderful, a reality so important, a promise yet to be fulfilled so 
glorious ? " 

The close of his address at the inauguration of the Union 
Club in Boston, delivered on the 9th of April, 1863, in the 
midst of the Civil War, typifies his eloquence at the end : — 



THE ORATORS 257 

" The cause in which we are engaged is the cause of the Constitu- 
tion and the Law, of civilisation and freedom, of man and of God. 
Let us engage in it with a steadiness and a fortitude, a courage and a 
zeal, a patience and a resolution, a hope and a cheer, worthy of the 
fathers from whom we are descended, of the country we defend, and 
of the privileges we inherit. There is a call and a duty, a work and a 
place, for all ; — for man and for woman, for rich and for poor, for 
old and for young, for the stout-hearted and strong-handed, for all who 
enjoy and all who deserve to enjoy the priceless blessings at stake. 
Let the venerable forms of the Pilgrim Fathers, the majestic images 
of our Revolutionary sires, and of the sages that gave us this glorious 
Union ; let the anxious expectations of the Friends of Liberty abroad, 
awakened at last to the true cause and the great issues of this contest ; 
let the hardships and perils of our brethren in the field and the fresh- 
made graves of the dear ones who have fallen ; let every memory of 
the past and every hope of the future, every thought and every feeling, 
that can nerve the arm, or fire the heart, or elevate and purify the soul 
of a patriot, — rouse and guide and cheer and inspire us to do, and, if 
need be, to die, for our Country ! " 



Between these two extracts there is certainly a contrast j 
but it is rather such a contrast as exists between the history of 
the very different times in which they were delivered than a 
temperamental one. The earlier, of course, is more conven- 
tional, more elaborate and more florid ; the latter, spoken at a 
moment of gravest national danger, at a moment too when 
the speaker had attained his full maturity, is more compact, 
more fervid, more stirring. But both alike reveal the consum- 
mate skill of a deliberate master of the art of oratory. 

The eloquence and the rhetorical skill of Webster and of 
Everett were the more admired in their own day for the reason 
that they were exercised in behalf of those political principles 
which then commanded the support of all conservative people 
in Massachusetts. So too was the eloquence of many other 
men, each of whom may fairly be held a master of the art of 
which Everett and Webster were the most eminent exponents. 
Even so cursory a study as ours may not neglect the name of 
Rufus Choate, like Webster a graduate of Dartmouth, like 
Everett a lifelong reader of the classics, and for years not 

17 



258 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

only eminent in public life, but acknowledged to be the most 
powerful advocate at the New England bar. A Uttle later 
than the prime of these men there arose in Boston another 
generation of orators, differing from their predecessors both in 
principle and to some degree in method, who used their great 
powers for purposes which impressed conservative people as 
dangerously demagogic. Of these the most eminent were 
Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Charles Sumner. On 
all three we shall touch later. But we may hardly again have 
occasion to mention an eminent citizen of the elder type who 
survived until 1894, and preserved to the end the traditions of 
that great school of formal oratory of which he was the last 
survivor, — Mr. Robert Charles Winthrop. 

With Mr. Winthrop, one may say, the oratory of New 
England expired. And now, as one considers its century and 
more of history, one discerns more and more clearly why the 
period in which it reached its height may best be understood 
when we call it a period of Renaissance. Almost from the 
time of the Revolution, isolated New England, like the rest 
of America, was awakening to a new sense of national con- 
sciousness ; so the society of New England, traditionally one 
which venerated its leaders, looked to the men whom circum- 
stances brought prominently forward for indubitable assertion 
of dignity in our national character. The professional cir- 
cumstances which brought men forward were generally those 
of the pulpit or the bar ; clergymen and lawyers accordingly 
found that they could no longer maintain their eminence by 
merely treading in the footsteps of their predecessors. Trained 
in our old Yankee colleges at a time when such education 
meant a little mathematics and a tolerable reading knowledge 
of the classics, these men, who felt themselves called upon 
admirably to express our new nationality, turned instinctively 
to that mode of expression which in crude form had long been 
characteristic of their country. In their impulsive desire to 
give this a new vitality, they instinctively began to emulate 



THE ORATORS 259 

first the formal oratory of England, which had reached its 
acme in the preceding century ; and then, perhaps more con- 
sciously, they strove to saturate themselves with the spirit of 
those immemorial masterpieces of oratory which help to 
immortalise the literatures of Rome and of Greece. 

On general principles, the world might have expected 
America to produce public utterances of a crudely passionate 
kind, marked rather by difference from what had gone before 
than by respect for traditional models. Instead, without a 
touch of affectation, our orators, obeying the genuine impulse 
of their nature, exerted their most strenuous energy in surpris- 
ingly successful efforts to emulate the achievements of an 
extremely elaborate art which had attained final excellence in 
the days of Cicero and Demosthenes. The oratorical models 
of Greece and of Rome they imitated in just such spirit as 
that in which the masterpieces of antique plastic art were 
imitated by fifteenth-century Italy. Apart from its political 
significance, as embodying principles which controlled the 
American history of their time, their work is significant in our 
study as proving how spontaneously the awakening national 
consciousness of New England strove to prove our country 
civilised by conscientious obedience to eldest civilised 
tradition. 



Ill 

THE NEW ENGLAND SCHOLARS AND HISTORIANS 

Such high development of mental activity as was indicated by 
the renascent oratory of New England is never solitary. As 
Emerson's memories of Everett implied, something similar 
appeared at the same period in the professional scholarship of 
the region. From the beginning, the centre of learning there 
had been Harvard College, founded to perpetuate a learned 
ministry. This it did throughout its seventeenth-century career; 
and in the eighteenth century it also had the distinction of 
educating many lawyers and statesmen who became eminent 
at the time of the Revolution. Thomas Hutchinson was a 
Harvard man, and so were almost all the leading Boston 
Tories, of whom he is the best remembered. So, too, were 
James Otis, and Joseph Warren, and the Adamses, and almost 
every Bostonian who attained distinction on the revolutionary 
side. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, how- 
ever. Harvard College remained little more than a boys' school. 
It received pupils very young ; it gave them a fair training in 
Latin and Greek, a little mathematics, and a touch of theology 
if they so inclined ; and then it sent them forth to the 
careers of mature life. It contented itself, in brief, with some- 
what languidly preserving the tradition of academic training 
planted in the days of Charles I. ; and this it held, in rather 
mediaeval spirit, to be chiefly valuable as the handmaiden of 
theology, and later of law too. One principal function of a 
true university — that of acquiring and publishing fresh 
knowledge — it had not attempted. 

At the close of the eighteenth century, indeed, learning at 
Harvard was probably inferior to that which had existed there a 



SCHOLARS AND HISTORIANS 261 

century before. In 1800, Latin seems to have been far less 
familiar to either teachers or students than it was to those who 
taught and studied under the presidency of Increase Mather. 
Until well into the nineteenth century, too, Harvard appeared 
less and less vital. In the surrounding air, however, a new 
and fresh spirit of learning declared itself, and the leaders of 
this, as well as the followers, were generally either Harvard men 
or men who in mature life were closely allied with our oldest 
college. The celebrated Count Rumford, for one, a Yankee 
country boy, began his regular study of science by attending 
the lectures of Professor John Winthrop of Harvard, before 
the Revolution ; and in spite of his permanent departure from 
his native country, he retained a keen interest in New Eng- 
land. In 1780 he had something to do with the founding 
in Boston of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 
which, with the exception of Franklin's Philosophical Society 
in Philadelphia, is the oldest learned society in America. For 
more than a century the American Academy has maintained, 
in its proceedings and its publications, a standard of learning 
recognised as excellent all over the world. Nor was it long 
alone in Boston. In 1791, the Massachusetts Historical 
Society was founded for the purpose of collecting, preserving, 
and publishing historical matter, chiefly relating to its ancestral 
Commonwealth. Like the American Academy, this society 
still flourishes, and during its century of existence it has 
published a considerable amount of material, admirably set 
forth and often of more than local importance. 

In the early years of the nineteenth century, too, certain 
young gentlemen of Boston, mostly graduates of Harvard and 
chiefly members of the learned professions, formed themselves 
into an Anthology Club, with the intention of conducting 
a literary and scholarly review. Their Anthology did not 
last long ; but their Club developed on the one hand into 
the Boston Athenasum, which in ninety years has grown into 
a remarkably well selected library of some two hundred thou- 



262 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

sand volumes; and in 1815, on the other hand, into that 
periodical which long remained the serious vehicle of scholarly 
New England thought, — the " North American Review." 
This was modelled on the great British Reviews, — the 
" Edinburgh " and the " Quarterly ; " and under the guid- 
ance of such men as William Tudor, Edward Tyrrell Chan- 
ning, Jared Sparks, James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot 
Norton, and the late Dr. Andrew Preston Peabody, it main- 
tained its dignity for more than fifty years. The present 
" North American Review," which has passed by purchase 
into different control, is, however admirable, entirely changed 
in character. 

Though the American Academy, the Massachusetts Histori- 
cal Society, the Boston Athenaeum, and the old " North 
American Review " may hardly be taken as comprehensive of 
the new learning which was springing into life among Boston 
men bred at Harvard, they are typical of it. In no aspect 
are they more so than in the fact that none of them was 
indigenous ; all alike were successful efforts to imitate in our 
independent New England such learned institutions as were 
among the most salient evidences of civilisation in Europe. 
What they stand for — the real motive which was in the air 
— was an awakening of American consciousness to the fact 
that serious contemporary standards existed in other countries 
than our own ; and that our claim to respect as a civilised 
community could no longer be maintained by the mere pre- 
servation of a respectable classical school for boys. Our first 
outbreak of the spirit of learning, indeed, was even more 
imitative than the contemporary literature which sprang up in 
New York, or than the oratory which in the same years so 
elaborately developed itself in Massachusetts. 

It was not until a little later that the scholarly impulses of 
New England produced either persons or works of literary 
distinction ; but the form which the characteristic literature of 
this scholarship was to take had already been indicated both by 



SCHOLARS AND HISTORIANS 263 

the early literary activities of this part of the country and by 
the nature of our most distinguished learned society. From 
the earliest period of Massachusetts, as we have seen, there 
was, along with theological writing, a considerable body of 
publications which may be roughly classified as historical. 
The " Magnalia " of Cotton Mather, for instance, the most 
typical literary production of seventeenth-century America, was 
almost as historical in impulse as it was theological. Earlier 
still, the most permanent literary monument of the Plymouth 
colony was Bradford's manuscript " History ; " and such other 
manuscripts as Winthrop's " History " and Sewall's " Diary " 
show how deeply rooted in the colony of Massachusetts too 
was a lasting fondness for historical record. Other than local 
history, indeed, seems to have interested the elder Yankees 
chiefly as it bore on the origins and development of New 
England. A comical example of this fact is to be found in 
the "Chronological History of New England in the Form of 
Annals," published in 1736, by the Reverend Thomas Prince, 
minister of the Old South Church. Prince had unrivalled op- 
portunities for collecting and preserving the facts of our first 
century ; but, having thought proper to begin his work by 
" an introduction, containing a brief Epitome of the most 
remarkable Transactions and Events ABROAD, from the 
CREATION/' he had the misfortune to die before he had 
brought the chronology of New England itself to a later period 
than 1630. A more philosophical work than Prince's was 
that " History of Massachusetts " by Thomas Hutchinson, 
which may perhaps be called the most respectable American 
book before the Revolution. From the foundation of the 
colony, in short, New England men had always felt strong 
interest in local affairs and traditions ; and this had resulted 
in a general habit of collecting and sometimes of publishing 
accounts of what had happened in their native regions. 

The temper in question is still familiar to any one who 
knows with what ardour native Yankees abandon themselves 



264 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

to the delights of genealogical research. Throughout the 
nineteenth century it has borne fruit in those innumerable 
town histories which make the local records of New England 
so minutely accessible to all who have patience to plod through 
innumerable volumes of trivial detail. It may fairly be 
regarded as the basis in New England character of the most 
considerable scholarly expression which New England de- 
veloped during its period of Renaissance. For during the 
nineteenth century there appeared in Boston a group of his- 
torians whose work became widely and justly celebrated. 

The first of these who occurs to one, although he made 
a deeper impression on the intellectual life of Boston than 
almost anybody else, is hardly remembered as of high literary 
importance. This was George Ticknor, who was born in 
1 79 1, the only son of a prosperous but not eminent man of 
business. He was sent to Dartmouth College, and after 
graduation prepared himself for the practice of law ; but find- 
ing this not congenial, and having in prospect fortune enough 
to maintain himself respectably without a profession, he de- 
termined to devote himself to pure scholarship. In 1815 he 
accordingly went abroad with letters of introduction which 
combined with his exceptional social qualities to give him dur- 
ing the next four years access to the most distinguished and 
interesting society in almost every European country. A 
portion of his stay abroad, which he devoted to serious study, 
he passed at the University of Gottingen, where Edward 
Everett came in the same year, 18 15. Together these were 
the first of that distinguished and continuous line of American 
scholars who have supplemented their native education by 
enthusiastic devotion to German learning. In 18 19, having 
returned to America, Ticknor became the first Smith Professor 
of the French and Spanish languages and Belles Lettres at 
Harvard College ; Everett at the same time began his lectures 
there as professor of Greek. Together they stood for a new 
principle in our old college, — that instructors ought not only 



SCHOLARS AND HISTORIANS 265 

to assure themselves that students have learned, but actually to 
teach. Everett relinquished his professorship in 1824, be- 
taking himself to that more public career which is better 
remembered. Ticknor, the first Harvard professor of modern 
languages, retained his chair until 1835 ; and during this time 
he strenuously attempted to enlarge the office of Harvard from 
that of a respectable high school to that of a true university. 
At that period, however, hardly any other New England 
scholars had had personal experience of foreign learning ; and 
time was not ripe for the changes which Ticknor so ardently 
advocated. For a while his efforts bade fair to succeed ; re- 
action followed ; but it is hardly too much to say that the 
germs of those modern phases of learning which have dis- 
tinguished Harvard College during the last thirty years, are 
discernible in the plans which George Ticknor cherished 
thirty years before. 

Besides this service to professional learning, Ticknor, in 
later life, had more than any one else to do with the establish- 
ment of that great engine of popular education which for 
some time distinguished Boston from other American cities, — 
the Public Library. Ticknor's private library was in its 
day among the largest and best selected on this side of the 
Atlantic ; and his enthusiasm in the cause of learning in- 
duced him to lend his books freely to any respectable persons 
who satisfied him that they really wanted to use them. His 
book-plate, inscribed simply with his name and the words 
Suum Cuique^ pleasantly records this admirable generosity, 
which is said to have resulted in no considerable loss. This 
experience, persisting through the renascent period of New 
England, convinced him that if he could bring the American 
public into free contact with good literature, the general taste 
for good reading would increase, and the general intelligence 
and consequent civilisation would improve, in accordance with 
the aspirations of human nature toward what is best. The 
idea of a great public library, then, grew in his mind ; and in 



266 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

1852 he was an eager leader in the movement which estab- 
lished in Boston the first and best public circulating library 
of America. 

As the first learned professor of modern languages in an 
American university, as the first exponent in our university 
life of continental scholarship, as the earliest of Americans to 
attempt the development of an American college into a modern 
university, and finally as the chief founder of the chief public 
library in the United States, Ticknor's claims upon popular 
memory are remarkable. What is more, those who knew 
him well felt for him a strong personal attachment ; and it is 
probable that no scholar or man of letters was ever more 
generous in aiding and encouraging whomever he found eager 
in learning or literature. At least in his later years, however, 
Ticknor's manners did not impress the public as engaging. 
His dignity seemed forbidding ; his tongue was certainly 
sharp ; to people who did not attract him his address was 
hardly sympathetic ; and his social habits, confirmed by almost 
lifelong intimacy with good European society, were a shade 
too exclusive for the growingly democratic taste about him. 
Yet it is hard to overestimate the difference which Ticknor's 
personal presence made in the intellectual history of New 
England, or the diffusion of knowledge which sprang from his 
generous impulse. 

If Ticknor's chief labours, however, took other than literary 
form, Ticknor would probably have regarded as his principal 
claim to recognition the " History of Spanish Literature," 
which he published in 1849. From the time of his first 
journey abroad he had been attracted to Spanish matters ; his 
professorship at Harvard, too, was partly devoted by its very 
terms to Spanish literature ; and incidentally he collected, and 
bequeathed to the Public Library of Boston, a Spanish library, 
said to be the most complete outside of Spain itself. It was 
not until thirty years after he began the work of the Smith 
professorship that he published his history. Fifty years later, 



SCHOLARS AND HISTORIANS 267 

this deeply scholarly book, which involved untiring investiga- 
tion of the best German type, remains authoritative ; and it 
was perhaps the first American book to establish throughout 
the learned world the position of any American scholar. On 
the other hand, it is not interesting. Ticknor's mind was 
rather acquisitive and retentive than creative. His work is 
that of a thoroughly trained scholar ; of a man, too, so sin- 
cerely devoted to literature that, as we have seen, his services 
to literary culture in America can hardly be overestimated ; 
of a man, furthermore, whose letters and journals show him, 
though deficient in humour, to have had at command an 
agreeable and fluent every-day style. When all is said, how- 
ever, the " History of Spanish Literature," taken by itself, is 
heavily respectable reading. A more winning example of 
Ticknor's literary power is the life of his friend and contem- 
porary, Prescott, which he wrote partly at the instance of the 
Massachusetts Historical Society, shortly after Prescott's 
death. Ticknor himself died at the age of eighty in 1871. 

About the time when Ticknor began his teaching in the 
Smith professorship at Harvard, a subsequently famous dec- 
laration of the Unitarian faith was made in the sermon 
preached at Baltimore by William Ellery Channing, on the 
occasion of the ordmation to the Unitarian ministry of a man 
no longer in his first youth, Jared Sparks. Sparks's min- 
isterial career was not very long. In 1824 ^^ became an 
editor of the " North American Review," and for the rest of 
his life he remained in New England. From 1839 to 1849 
he was professor of history at Harvard; from 1849 to 1853 
he was President of the College ; and after his resignation 
he continued resident in Cambridge until his death, in 1866. 

Sparks left behind him no original writings which have sur- 
vived ; but his special services to historical study in New 
England were almost as great as were those of Ticknor to 
the study of modern languages and to the modern spirit in 
learning. As early as 1829 he began to issue an elaborate 



268 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

collection of the diplomatic correspondence of the American 
Revolution. Between 1834 and 1840 he collected and issued 
the first authoritative editions of the writings of Washington 
and of Franklin ; and although his editorial principles were 
not in all respects such as have been sanctioned by later 
scholarship, he was scrupulously exact in statements of fact 
and untiring in methodical accumulation of material. In 
1834 appeared the first volume of his "Library of American 
Biography," the publication of which continued until 1847. 
In each volume are the lives of three or four eminent Ameri- 
cans, generally written by enthusiastic young scholars, but all 
subjected to the editorial supervision of Sparks, who thus 
brought into being a still valuable biographical dictionary. 

Such work as this clearly evinces wide and enthusiastic 
interest in the study and writing of history. Though not 
educated in Germany, Sparks, with his untiring energy in 
the accumulation and arrangement of material, and his un- 
usual power of making other people work systematically, 
was very Hke a sound German scholar. He really established 
a large historical factory ; with skilled help, he collected all 
the raw material he could find ; and he turned out some- 
thing like a finished article in lengths to suit, — somewhat 
as his commercial contemporaries spun excellent cotton. In 
a mechanical way his work was admirable ; he really ad- 
vanced New England scholarship ; and he may be said to 
have founded that school of earnest historical study which to 
this day remains so energetic and distinguished at the college 
of which he was a faithful professor and president. 

If neither Ticknor nor Sparks contributed to permanent 
literature, the names of both are closely connected with that 
of the first man in New England who wrote history in a spirit 
as literary as that of Gibbon or Macaulay. This is the per- 
sonal friend whose biography by Ticknor is the most sym- 
pathetic work which Ticknor has left us, — William Hickling 
Prescott. In the first volume of Sparks's " Library of Amer- 



SCHOLARS AND HISTORIANS 269 

ican Biography," published in 1834, is Prescott's "Life of 
Charles Brockden Brown," written in the somewhat florid 
style then fashionable. At the time when this was published, 
Prescott was known as a gentleman of scholarly temper and 
comfortable fortune, approaching the age of forty, whose life 
had probably been ruined by an accident at college. The 
students of his day had been boisterous in table manners ; 
and on one occasion somebody thoughtlessly threw a piece 
of bread across the dining-room, striking Prescott in the eye. 
This resulted in something so near permanent blindness 
that he could never read again, and that he could write only 
with the aid of a machine composed of parallel wires by 
which he painfully guided his pencil. 

In spite of these obstacles he quietly set to work on his 
history of "Ferdinand and Isabella." As the book approached 
completion, he was beset with doubts of its merit. Unable 
to use his eyes, he had been compelled to collect his material 
through the aid of readers, and then to compose it in his 
head before proceeding to the process of dictation ; and he 
was so far from satisfied with the result of his labours that 
he hesitated about publication. An anecdote which Ticknor 
relates of this moment is characteristic of the man and of 
his time. " He consulted his father, as he always did when 
he doubted in relation to matters of consequence. His 
father not only advised the publication, but told him that ' the 
man who writes a book which he is afraid to publish is a 
coward.' " So in 1838 " Ferdinand and Isabella" was pub- 
lished ; and at last New England had produced a permanent 
historian. The " Conquest of Mexico" followed in 1843, 
the "Conquest of Peru" in 1847, ^"^ Prescott was still 
engaged on his "Life of Philip II." when, in 1859, apoplexy 
overtook him at the age of sixty-three. 

Since Prescott's time, the tendency has been more and more 
to regard history as a matter rather of science than of litera- 
ture ; the fashion of style, too, has greatly changed from that 



2^o THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

which prevailed when New England found the model of 
rhetorical excellence in its formal oratory. Prescott's work, 
then, is often mentioned as rather romantic than scholarly. 
In this view there is some justice. The scholarship of his 
day had not collected anything like the material now at the 
disposal of students; and Prescott's infirmity of sight could 
not help limiting the range of his investigation. His style, 
too, always clear and readable, and often vivid, is somewhat 
florid and generally coloured by what seems a conviction that 
historical writers should maintain the dignity of history. For 
all this, his works so admirably combine substantial truth with 
literary spirit that they are more useful than many which are 
respected as more authoritative. What he tells us is the re- 
sult of thoughtful study ; and he tells it in a manner so clear, 
and for all its formality so agreeable, that when you have read 
one of his chapters you remember without effort what it is 
about. With a spirit as modern as George Ticknor's, and 
with much of the systematic scholarship of Jared Sparks, Pres- 
cott combined unusual literary power. 

For our purposes, however, the most notable phase of his 
work is to be found in the subjects to which he turned. At 
first his aspirations to historical writing took a general form. 
At last, after hesitation whether to write of antiquity, of Italy, 
or of what not, he was most attracted by the same romantic 
Spain which a few years before had captivated Irving. Sitting 
blind in his New England of the early Renaissance, whose 
outward aspect was so staidly decorous, he found his imagina- 
tion most stirred by those phases of modern history which 
were most splendidly unlike his ancestral inexperience. He 
chose first that climax of Spanish history when in the same 
year, 1492, native Spaniards triumphantly closed their eight 
hundred years of conflict against the Moorish invaders, and the 
voyage of Columbus opened to Spain those new empires of 
which for a while our own New England had seemed likely 
to be a part. Then he found deeply stirring the fatal conflict 



SCHOLARS AND HISTORIANS 271 

between Spanish invaders and the civilisations of prehistoric 
America. Finally, having written of Spanish power at its 
zenith, he began to record the tale of its stormy sunset in the 
cloudy reign of Philip II. So the impulse of this first of our 
literary historians seems very like that of Irving. Irving's 
books on Spain, however, are rather historical romances than 
scholarly histories. Instead of being a serious narrative, for 
example, duly referred to authority, Irving's " Conquest of 
Granada " takes the form of a make-believe chronicle similar 
to that in which Mark Twain lately told the story of Joan of 
Arc. Prescott, a little later, treated Irving's subjects in the 
spirit of a scholarly historian. In Irving and Prescott alike, 
however, the inexperienced American imagination, starved at 
home of all traces of antique splendour, found itself most 
strongly stimulated by the most brilliant pageant of the roman- 
tic European past. 

There were New England historians, to be sure, who wrote 
about our own country. The most eminent of these was 
George Bancroft, born in 1800, who graduated at Harvard, 
and like Ticknor and Everett was a student in Germany. 
Afterwards he was for a while a tutor at Harvard, and later 
a master of the celebrated Round Hill school in Western 
Massachusetts. Not long afterwards he became a public man ; 
he was collector of the port of Boston, he was Secretary of the 
Navy under President Polk, and subsequently he was Minister 
to both England and Germany. His political principles, how- 
ever, so differed from those prevalent among the better classes 
of his early days in Boston, that he left New England at about 
the age of forty and afterwards resided chiefly in Washington. 
In 1834, the year in which Prescott's " Life of Brockden 
Brown" was published, appeared, too, the first volume of 
Bancroft's " History of the United States," a work on which 
he was steadily engaged for fifty-one years, and which he left 
unfinished. The dominant politics of New England had been 
Federalist ; Bancroft's history sympathised with the Demo- 



272 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

cratic party. In consequence, sharp fault was found with 
him, and he was never on cordial terms with the other New 
England historians ; but he persevered in writing history all 
his life, and for all the diffuse floridity of his style, he is still 
a respectable authority. A little later, Mr. Richard Hildreth, 
a somewhat younger man, wrote a " History of the United 
States " from the Federalist point of view ; and Dr. John 
Gorham Palfrey was for years engaged on his minutely life- 
less " History of New England." In these, however, and in 
the other historians who were writing of our own country 
there was less imaginative vigour and far less literary power 
than in Prescott or in the two younger New England histo- 
rians whose works are indubitably literature. 

The first of these younger men was John Lothrop Motley, 
born in 1814. He graduated at Harvard j he studied for a 
while in Germany, where he began in youth a lifelong friend- 
ship with his fellow-student Prince Bismarck ; and toward the 
end of his life he lived mostly in Europe. At one time he 
was Minister to Austria, and later to England. He died in 
England in 1877. As early as 1839 he wrote a novel which 
deserved its unusual lack of success. A little later he anony- 
mously wrote for the " North American Review " an article 
on Peter the Great which attracted much favourable attention ; 
but it was not until 1856, when he was already past forty 
years old, that he published his first permanent work, " The 
Rise of the Dutch Republic." This was followed, between 
1861 and 1868, by his " History of the United Netherlands," 
and finally in 1874 by his "John of Barneveld." 

Motley's historical work is obviously influenced by the 
vividly picturesque writings of Carlyle. It is clearly influ- 
enced, too, by intense sympathy with that liberal spirit which 
he believed to characterise the people of the Netherlands during 
their prolonged conflict with Spain. From these traits result 
several obvious faults. In trying to be vivid, he becomes 
artificial. In the matter of character, too, his Spaniards are 



SCHOLARS AND HISTORIANS 273 

apt to be intensely black, and his Netherlanders ripe for the 
heavenly rewards to which he sends them as serenely as 
romantic novelists provide for the earthly happiness of heroes 
and heroines. Yet, for all his sincerely partisan temper, 
Motley was so industrious in accumulating material, so untir- 
ing in his effort vividly to picture its external aspect, and so 
heartily in sympathy with his work, that he is almost always 
interesting. What most deeply stirred him was his belief in 
the abstract right of man to political liberty ; and this he 
wished to celebrate with epic spirit. Belief and spirit alike 
were characteristically American ; in the history of his own 
country there was abundant evidence of both. The assertion 
of liberty which finally stirred his imagination to the point of 
expression, however, was not that of his American forefathers, 
but the earlier, more brilliantly picturesque, and above all 
more remote one which had marked the history of a foreign 
race in Europe. Even so late as Motley's day, in short, the 
historical imagination of America still needed more ardent 
stimulant than could be distilled from the copious but juice- 
less material which had satisfied the acquisitive appetite of 
Jared Sparks. 

The latest and most mature of our New England historians 
was more national. Francis Parkman, the son of a Unitarian 
minister, was born at Boston in 1823 ^^^ graduated at Har- 
vard in 1844. By that time his health had already shown 
signs of infirmity ; and this was so aggravated by imprudent 
physical exposure during a journey across the continent shortly 
after graduation that he was a lifelong invalid. The brief 
record of his ailments which he left as a scientific document 
to the Massachusetts Historical Society unwittingly reveals 
his astonishing courage. Threatened for a full half-century 
with ruinous malady of both brain and body, he persisted, by 
sheer force of will, with literary plans which he had formed 
almost in boyhood. His imagination was first kindled by the 
forests of our ancestral continent. These excited his interest 



274 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

in the native races of America ; and this, in turn, obviously 
brought him to the frequent alliances between the French and 
the Indians during the first two centuries of our American 
history. His lifelong work, then, finally resulted in those 
volumes which record from beginning to end the struggles for 
the possession of North America between the French, with 
their Indian allies, and that English-speaking race whose final 
victory decided that our continent was to be a seminary of 
English Law. 

In the end, then, Parkman's works prove to possess great 
philosophic interest. With full sympathy for both sides, with 
untiring industry in the accumulation of material, with good 
sense so judicial as to forbid him the vagaries of preconcep- 
tion, and with a literary sensitiveness which made his style — 
at first marked by the floridity fashionable in 1850 — finally 
a model of sound prose, he set forth the struggles which de- 
cided the political future of America. Moved to this task by 
an impulse rather romantic than scientific, to be sure, gifted 
with a singularly vivid imagination, too careful a scholar to 
risk undue generalisation, and throughout life so hampered by 
illness that he could very rarely permit himself prolonged 
mental eff^ort, Parkman sometimes appears chiefly a writer of 
romantic narrative. As you grow familiar with his work, 
however, you feel it so true that you can infuse it with phi- 
losophy for yourself. It is hardly too much to say that his 
writings affx)rd as sound a basis for historic philosophising as 
does great fiction for philosophising about human nature. 

Parkman, who died in 1893, brings the story of renascent 
scholarship in New England almost to our own day. When 
the nineteenth century began, our scholarship was merely a 
traditional memory of classical learning, generally treated as 
the handmaiden either of professional theology or of profes- 
sional law. When the spirit of a new life began to declare 
itself here, and people grew aware of contemporary foreign 
achievement, there came first a little group of men who 



SCHOLARS AND HISTORIANS 275 

studied in Europe and brought home the full spirit of that 
continental scholarship which during the present century has 
so dominated learning in America. As this spirit began to 
express itself in literary form, it united with our ancestral 
fondness for historic records to produce, just after the moment 
when formal oratory most flourished here, an eminent school 
of historical literature. Most of this history, however, deals 
with foreign subjects. The historians of New England were 
generally at their best when stirred by matters remote from 
any actual human experience enjoyed either by themselves or 
by such forefathers as they could personally have known even 
by tradition. 

Considering the relation of this school of history to the 
historical literature of England, one is inevitably reminded 
that the greatest English history, Gibbon's " Decline and 
Fall of the Roman Empire," first appeared in the very year 
of our Declaration of Independence. In one aspect, of course, 
the temper of Gibbon is as far from romantic as possible. He 
is the first, and in certain aspects the greatest, of modern 
philosophical historians ; and his style has all the formality of 
the century during which he wrote. In another aspect the 
relation of Gibbon's history to the England which bred him 
seems very like that of our New England histories to the 
country and the life which bred their writers. Gibbon and 
our own historians alike turned to a larger and more splendid 
field than was afforded by their national annals. Both alike 
were distinctly affected by an alert consciousness of what ex- 
cellent work had been done in contemporary foreign countries. 
Both carefully expressed themselves with conscientious devo- 
tion to what they believed the highest literary canons. Both 
produced work which has lasted not only as history but as 
literature too. Gibbon wrote in the very year when America 
declared her independence of England ; Prescott began his 
work in Boston nearly sixty years later. There is an aspect, 
then, in which our historical literature seems to lag behind 



2 76 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

that of the mother country much as Irving's prose — con- 
temporary with the full outburst of nineteenth-century roman- 
ticism in England — lags behind the prose of Goldsmith. 

The name of Gibbon suggests another fact about our 
American historians which is not quite so obvious or so cer- 
tain, but which may help us in our effort to define their na- 
tional character. Gibbon's power was incomparably greater 
than that of any American writer j but along with that power 
Gibbon had a trait which no one can fail to observe, — he 
relished indecency. Whoever shares this relish will find in 
the untranslated notes to many of his passages plenty of mor- 
sels which our present customs forbid us either to translate or 
to mention in general society. In our American historians 
there is nothing of the sort. Their writings may not much 
have enriched human imagination, but they have never be- 
fouled it. In the literature of every other country you will 
find lubricity ; in that of America hardly any. Foreigners are 
apt to think this trait hypocritical; whoever knows the finer 
minds of New England will be disposed to believe it a matter 
not of conscientious determination but rather of instinctive 
preference. 

Very cursory, all this ; and there can be no doubt that the 
historians of New England, like the New England orators, 
might profitably be made the subject of minute and interest- 
ing separate study. Our own concern, however, is chiefly 
with pure letters. Before we can deal with them intelligently 
we must glance at still other aspects of renascent New Eng- 
land. We have glanced at its oratory, and at its scholarship. 
We must now turn to its religion and its philosophy. 



IV 



UNITARIANISM 



Marked as was the change in the oratory and the scholar- 
ship of New England during the first quarter of the nine- 
teenth century, the change in the dominant religious views 
of a community which had always been dominated by relig- 
ion was more marked still. From the beginning till after the 
Revolution, the creed of New England had been the Calvin- 
ism of the emigrant Puritans. In 1809, William EUery 
Channing, then a minister twenty-nine years old, wrote of 
this old faith in the following terms : — 

" Calvinism teaches, that, in consequence of Adam's sin in eating 
the forbidden fruit, God brings into life all his posterity with a nature 
wholly corrupt, so that they are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made 
opposite to all that is spiritually good, and wholly inclined to all evil, 
and that continually. It teaches, that all mankind, having fallen in 
Adam, are under God's wrath and curse, and so made liable to all 
miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell forever. 
It teaches, that, from this ruined race, God, out of his mere good 
pleasure, has elected a certain number to be saved by Christ, not in- 
duced to this choice by any foresight of their faith or good works, but 
wholly by his free grace and love ; and that, having thus predesti- 
nated them to eternal life, he renews and sanctifies them by his al- 
mighty and special agency, and brings them into a state of grace, 
from which they cannot fall and perish. It teaches, that the rest of 
mankind he is pleased to pass over, and to ordain them to dishonour 
and wrath for their sins, to the honour of his justice and power ; in 
other words, he leaves the rest to the corruption in which they were 
born, withholds the grace which is necessary to their recovery, and 
condemns them to ' most grievous torments in soul and body without 
intermission in hell-fire for ever.' Such is Calvinism, as gathered 
from the most authentic records of the doctrine. Whoever will con- 
sult the famous Assembly's Catechisms and Confession, will see the 
peculiarities of the system in all their length and breadth of deform- 



2^% THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

ity. A man of plain sense, whose spirit has not been broken to this 
creed by education or terror, will think that it is not necessary for us 
to travel to heathen countries, to learn how mournfully the human 
mind may misrepresent the Deity." 

" How mournfully the human mind may misrepresent the 
Deity ! " You will be at pains to find nine words which 
shall more thoroughly express the change which the Renais- 
sance brought to the leading religious spirits of Boston. 

The resulting alteration in dogmatic theology has given to 
the new school of New England divines the name of Uni- 
tarians. According to the old creed, which held salvation 
from Adam's fall to be attainable only through God's grace, 
won by the mediation of Jesus Christ, the divine character of 
Christ was essential to redemption ; without his superhuman 
aid all human beings were irrevocably doomed. But the 
moment you assumed human nature to contain adequate seeds 
of good, the necessity for a divine Redeemer disappeared, and 
redemption became only a matter of divine convenience. 
The second person of the Trinity having thus lost his mystic 
office, the third spread wing and vanished into the radiance 
of a new heaven. In this glorious region the New England 
Unitarians discerned singly and alone the one God, who had 
made man in his image. One almost perfect image they recog- 
nised in Jesus Christ ; a great many inferior but still indubit- 
able ones they found actually to populate the Commonwealth 
of Massachusetts. 

Although this radical change in theology was what gave 
Unitarianism its name, the underlying feeling which gave it 
being had little concern with mystic dogmas. Whatever the 
philosophy of primitive Christianity, the philosophy of tradi- 
tional Christianity had for centuries taught the depravity of 
human nature ; this dogma the Puritans had brought to New 
England, where they had uncompromisingly preserved it. 
Now, whatever your philosophy, this dogma does account 
for such social phenomena as occur in densely populated lands 



UNITARJANISM 279 

where economic pressure is strong. In our own great cities 
you need a buoyant spirit and a hopefully unobservant eye to 
perceive much besides evil ; and if you compare Boston or 
New York with London or Paris, you can hardly avoid dis- 
cerning, beneath the European civilisation which is externally 
lovelier than ours, depths of foulness to which we have not 
yet sunk. The Europe of Calvin's time seems on the whole 
even more pervasively wicked ; and more wicked still seems 
that decadent Roman Empire where Augustine formulated the 
dogmas which at last Channing so unfalteringly set aside. If 
you chance to believe in Hell, most people in crowded dense 
societies really seem bound thither; and those who have the 
strength morally to resist such environment seem by contrast 
totally different from the mass of humanity. 

We need hardly remind ourselves, however, that up to the 
time of Channing the history of America, and particularly of 
New England, had been a history of national inexperience. 
When Cotton Mather wrote his " Magnalia " in the closing 
seventeenth century, his purpose was to prove that during the 
first seventy-five years of New England there had flourished 
and lived and died there so many regenerate human beings that 
a man of sense might almost statistically infer New England 
to be specially favoured by God. The governors of the region, 
and its preachers and teachers, not to speak of their many 
godly servants and followers, had revealed Christian graces to 
a degree which Mather's common-sense held to evidence an 
unprecedented outpouring of divine grace. In this contention 
there was an element of truth; compared with other races, 
the Yankee people, released for generations from the pressure 
of dense European life, found a considerable degree of good- 
ness surprisingly practicable. This social fact resembled 
a familiar domestic one : an eldest child is apt to be angelic 
until some little brother gets big enough to interfere with 
him J and if by chance no little brother appears, the angelic 
traits will very likely persist until the child goes to school or 



28o THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

otherwise comes in contact with external life. Up to the 
days of Channing himself, the Yankee race may be likened 
to a Puritan child gravely playing alone. However crude its 
traits, however simple, however unwinsome, they were hardly 
such as reasonable men, without the guidance of dogmatic 
teaching, would conclude to indicate irrevocable damnation. 

So even by the time of Edwards, Calvinistic dogma 
and national inexperience were unwittingly at odds. Our 
glances at subsequent American letters must have shown how 
steadily the native human nature of America continued to 
express itself in forms which could not reasonably be held 
infernal. In New York, for example, the first third of the 
nineteenth century produced Brockden Brown and Irving and 
Cooper and Bryant ; and, at a period distinctly later than that 
with which we are now concerned, the literature of which they 
were the leaders faded into no deeper decadence than the 
work of Poe, of Willis, and of the Knickerbocker School. 
Not eternally memorable, even the worst of these personages 
does not seem worthy of perdition as distinguished from neg- 
lect. Turning to certain phases of New England at about 
the same time, we saw in its public life the patriotic intensity 
of Webster and the classical personality of Everett, estab- 
lishing a tradition of sustained dignity which passed only with 
Mr. Winthrop, who lies beneath the well-earned epitaph, 
" Eminent as a scholar, an orator, a statesman, and a philan- 
thropist, — above all, a Christian." And when we came to 
the scholarship of New England, we found it finally ripening 
into the stainless pages of Ticknor, of Prescott, of Motley, 
and of Parkman. 

In a society like this, Calvinistic dogma seems constantly 
further from truth, as taught by actual life. If everything 
which men do is essentially damnable, if they can be saved 
from eternal punishment only by the divine redemption which 
comes to the elect through Christ, the incarnate son of God, 
men ought continually to behave abominably. However true 



UNITARIANISM 281 

to experience in dense old worlds, such habitually abominable 
conduct was untrue to the national inexperience of America, 
and particularly of renascent New England. The social 
structure of this region had been pretty rigid from the be- 
ginning. Well into the nineteenth century the clergy main- 
tained much of their pristine social lead ; and this partly 
because of a trait which remained unaltered throughout the 
rise and the decline of Unitarianism. As a class, they were 
deeply earnest and sincerely truthful. Even in the eighteenth 
century, then, a considerable number of these ministers, par- 
ticularly of the region about Boston, began insensibly to relax 
the full rigour of dogmatic Calvinism. There was no formal 
break, but in the utterances of Boston pulpits you were less 
and less apt to scent hell-fire. 

When good Dr. Freeman, then, minister of King's Chapel, 
was compelled to revise the Anglican Prayer Book, and found 
himself conscientiously disposed so to alter the liturgy as obvi- 
ously to modify the dogma of the Trinity, he may not have 
felt half so radical as time has proved him. After the interval 
of a century, his King's Chapel liturgy, still in use and some- 
times held to mark the beginning of Boston Unitarianism, 
presents a startling contrast to most older forms of Chris- 
tianity on this continent. Its insistence on the divine unity 
of God, and on the loving inspiration of God's word, un- 
deniably implies a tendency to regard Christ only as an excel- 
lent earthly manifestation of God's creative power. He 
seems no longer a mystic being whose divine interposition is 
needed to preserve humanity from destruction. The question 
of his essential nature is rather neglected. Half-God and 
half-man, if you choose so to believe, he is not exactly God. 
Men need him not as a redeemer, but as an example. 

The King's Chapel liturgy was published in 1785. About 
twenty years later. Harvard College succumbed to the temper 
which the liturgy embodies. The chief theological chair at 
Harvard is the Hollis Professorship of Divinity, — at present 



282 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

held by a scholar whose knowledge of Babylonian inscriptions 
is justly celebrated. Up to 1805 it had remained a stronghold 
of Calvinistic doctrine. In that year it was given to the Rev- 
erend Henry Ware, an avowed Unitarian, whose conceptions 
of human nature were introspectively confirmed by lifelong 
contemplation of the fact that " Ware was honest as all Wares 
be." The orthodox party at Harvard had opposed Ware 
with all their might; so when he was made Hollis Professor, 
the ancestral college of Puritan New England was finally 
handed over to Unitarianism. Until very recent years this 
remained its acknowledged faith. At last its liberalism became 
such as to make even Unitarian dogmas inconvenient ; its 
avowed religion is now described as non-sectarian, and its 
chapel has long abandoned the use of the sacrament. 

Defeated at Harvard, the orthodox party retreated to An- 
dover, where they founded the Theological Seminary which 
until very lately forlornly defended old Calvinism in a region 
abandoned to its enemies. Nowadays the whole thing is fad- 
ing into history, but at first the conflict was heart-breaking. 
There is a pathetic story of Professor Pearson, who, on the 
election of Ware, retired from Harvard to become one of the 
founders of Andover. In his last days the good man's speech 
was paralysed ; and when toward the end of his life an old 
Harvard friend, who had not seen him for years, came to 
visit him, time had done its work. With mournful tears in 
his eyes the dumb old Calvinist took his friend's hand and 
stroked it, unable to speak his grief that their ways had parted 
for eternity. For on each side faith was fervent ; and if the 
conquering Unitarians believed themselves to be destroying 
pernicious and ugly heresy, the Calvinists believed just as 
sincerely that in angelic guise the devil had possessed himself 
of New Englajid. In their mood, there was a consequent 
depth of despair to which the Unitarians have hardly done 
full justice. To the Unitarian mind there has never been any 
valid reason why good men of other opinions than theirs should 



UNITARIANISM 283 

not enjoy everlasting bliss ; but the very essence of the 
Calvinists' creed condemned to everlasting woe every human 
being who rejected the divinely revealed truth of their grimly 
uncompromising system. 

To suppose, however, that the founders of Unitarianism 
meant to be unchristian would be totally to misunderstand them. 
They revered the Scriptures as profoundly as ever Calvinists 
did. The difference was that they discerned in Scripture no 
such teaching as the experience of old-world centuries had 
crystallised into Calvinistic dogma. In the first place, they 
found in the Bible no passages which necessarily involved the 
dogma of the Trinity. There might be puzzling sentences ; 
but there were also clear, constant statements that there is one 
God, who made man in His image. Very good, they held ; 
this assertion amounts to proof that men are the children of 
God, and that incidentally they have inherited from God the 
divine faculties of reason and of conscience. When in 
the Bible, then, there are puzzling texts, or when in life 
there are puzzling moments, our duty is to face them in a 
conscientiously reasonable temper. If we are truly made in 
the image of God, we shall thus reach true conclusions ; and 
meanwhile, to guide our way, God has made that most excel- 
lent of his creatures, Jesus Christ, and has authentically re- 
corded his career in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, 
and John. Search these yourself; use the light of the Scrip- 
tures ; remember the example of Christ ; and all will be well. 
If there be any such thing as damnation, it can result only 
from lack of self-searching, from deliberate neglect of scrip- 
tural light, or from wilful disregard of Christ's example. 

From this state of faith there naturally resulted in Unita- 
rianism a degree of spiritual freedom which allowed each 
minister to proclaim whatever truth presented itself to his 
conicience. Unitarianism has never formulated a creed. It 
has tacitly accepted, however, certain traditions which have 
been classically set forth by its great apostle, William Ellery 



284 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

Channing. He was born at Newport in 1780 ; he took 
his degree at Harvard in 1798; and from 1803 to 1840 
he was minister at the Federal Street Church in Boston. 
He died in 1842. 

In 1 819, he preached at Baltimore, on the occasion of 
the ordination of Jared Sparks, his famous sermon on Uni- 
tarian Christianity. He took his text from i Thess. v. 21 : 
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." His first 
point is that " we regard the Scriptures as the records of 
God's successive revelations to mankind, and particularly of 
the last and most perfect revelation of his will by Jesus 
Christ." The Scriptures, he goes on to say, must be inter- 
preted by the light of reason. So, applying reason to Scrip- 
ture, he deduces in the first place the doctrine of God's 
unity, " that there is one God, and one only ; " secondly, 
that "Jesus is one mind, one soul, one being, as truly one 
as we are, and equally distinct from the one God ; " thirdly, 
that " God is morally perfect ; " fourthly, that " Jesus was 
sent by the Father to effect a moral or spiritual deliverance of 
mankind ; that is, to rescue men from sin and its conse- 
quences, and to bring them to a state of everlasting purity and 
happiness ; " and, fifthly, that " all virtue has its foundation in 
the moral nature of man, that is, in conscience, or his sense of 
duty, and in the power of forming his temper and life accord- 
ing to conscience." 

On this supreme authority of conscience Unitarianism 
tended to throw more and more emphasis. Toward the end 
of Channing's life he wrote some introductory remarks to 
a collected edition of his works from which the following par- 
agraph is worth attention : — 

" We must start in religion from our own souls. In these is the 
fountain of all divine truth. An outward revelation is only possible 
and intelligible, on the ground of conceptions and principles, previ- 
ously furnished by the soul. Here is our primitive teacher and light. 
Let us not disparage it. There are, indeed, philosophical schools of 
the present day, who tell us that we are to start in all our speculations 



UNITARIANISM 285 

from the Absolute, the Infinite. But we rise to these conceptions 
from the contemplation of our own nature ; and even if it were not so, 
of what avail would be the notion of an Absolute, Infinite existence, 
and Uncaused Unity, if stripped of all those intellectual and moral 
attributes, which we learn only from our own souls ? What but a 
vague shadow, a sounding name, is the metaphysical Deity, the sub- 
stance without modes, the being without properties, the naked unity, 
which performs such a part in some of our philosophical systems ? 
The only God, whom our thoughts can rest on, and our hearts can 
cling to, and our consciences can recognise, is the God whose image 
dwells in our own souls. The grand ideas of Power, Reason, Wis- 
dom, Love, Rectitude, flohness, Blessedness, that is, of all God's 
attributes, come from within, from the action of our own spiritual 
nature. Many indeed think that they learn God from marks of design 
and skill in the outward world; but our ideas of design and skill, of a 
determining cause, of an end or purpose, are derived from conscious- 
ness, from our own souls. Thus the soul is the spring of our know- 
ledge of God." 

A more astonishing departure from all the traditions of 
ecclesiastical Christianity was never phrased. Human nature, 
Channing holds, is essentially good ; man is made in the 
image of God, and all man need do is to follow the light 
which God has given him. The greatest source of that light, 
of course, is Christ. Whether Christ was literally the son 
of God or not makes no difference : he walked the earth ; 
he was the most perfect of men ; and we can follow him. 
He suffered little children to come unto him, and he will 
suffer us larger children to come likewise. He was human, 
and so are we. In earthly life he could avoid damnation, and 
all we need do — if indeed there be real dano-er of damnation at 

O 

all — is to behave as nearly like him as we can. If the false 
teachings of a moribund heresy make all this reasonable truth 
seem questionable, look about you : do you find your friends 
damnable, or, on the whole, made in the image of God ? Do 
they deserve, as In that sermon of Edwards's, to be held sus- 
pended by a spider-like thread over a fiery furnace into which 
they may justly be cast at any moment; or rather, for all 
their faults and errors, do they not merit eternal mercy ? 



286 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

So if all of us try to do our best, is there any reasonable 
cause for fearing that everything shall not ultimately go right ? 
The old Unitarians looked about them and honestly found 
human nature reassuring. 

What ultimately distinguishes early Unitarianism from the 
Calvinism which it so calmly dethroned, then, is this respect 
for what is good in human nature as contrasted with the 
Calvinistic insistence on what is bad. What is good needs 
encouragement; what is bad needs checking. What is good 
merits freedom; what is bad demands control. Obedience 
to authority, the Calvinists held, may reveal in you the tokens 
of salvation ; spiritual freedom, the Unitarians maintained, 
must result in . spiritual growth. For a dogmatic dread they 
substituted an illimitable hope. Evil and sin, sorrow and 
weakness, they did not deny ; but trusting in the infinite good- 
ness of God, they could not believe evil or sin, the sorrows or 
the weaknesses of humanity, to be more than passing shadows. 
Inspired with this newly hopeful spirit, they held their way 
through the New England whose better sort were content for 
half a century to follow them. 

Channing has been dead for more than fifty years, and 
the religious movement of which he was the central figure is 
no longer in the ascendant. He himself protested against 
doctrinal stagnation : " Unitarianism," ... he wrote in 
1841, "began as a protest against the rejection of reason, — 
against mental slavery. It pledged itself to progress as its 
life's end ; but it has gradually grown stationary, and now we 
have a Unitarian orthodoxy." The good man need not have 
troubled himself about that. Almost in his own time, on the 
one hand, the progress of personal freedom led to something 
like rejection of Christianity ; on the other hand, it reacted 
into acceptance of the oldest Christian traditions. Typical 
examples of these tendencies may be found in the careers of 
Mr. George Ripley and his wife. Beginning in full sympathy, 
as ardent Unitarians, they so parted in faith that Mrs. Ripley 



UNITARIANISM 287 

died in communion with the Roman Catholic Church, while 
Mr. Ripley, who long survived her, became a devout free- 
thinker. 

Our present concern, however, is not with that decay of 
New England Unitarianism so inevitably involved in the 
individualism of its teaching. Here we are concerned rather 
with its pristine growth and vigour. In the article on " Uni- 
tarianism in Boston," contributed by the late Dr. Andrew 
Preston Peabodv to the third volume of Winsor's " Memorial 
History of Boston," there is a list of the Unitarian ministers 
of the town from the beginning to about 1875. Whoever 
knows anything of the personalities for which these names 
stand will be struck with one fact : even more certainly than 
the elder worthies whom Cotton Mather recorded in his 
" Magnalia," these are a company of such sweet, pure, noble 
spirits as must arouse in men who dwell with them a deep 
respect for human nature. The last commanding spiritual 
teacher of New England chanced to be of another faith ; but 
what made Phillips Brooks such a power in Boston was the 
same kind of personality which half a century before him had 
generally distinguished the Unitarian clergy. Whoever knew 
the great bishop personally can hardly have failed to observe 
the trait which was at once his strongest and his weakest : 
his instinctive nature was so good that he never quite realised 
the badness and the uncleanness which beset the lives of 
common men with temptation. In him, just as in the fathers 
of Unitarianism, the national inexperience of America per- 
mitted almost unrestrained the development of a moral purity 
which to those who possess it makes the grim philosophy 
of damnation seem an ill-conceived nursery tale. 

The Unitarianism of New England, of course, was not 
unique either theologically or philosophically. In its isolated 
home, however, it chanced to develop one feature which 
distinguishes its early career from similar phases of religious 
history elsewhere. The astonishing personal purity and moral 



288 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

beauty of its leaders combined with their engaging theology to 
effect the rapid social conquest of the whole region about 
Boston. We have seen how King's Chapel and Harvard 
College passed into Unitarian hands. The same was true of 
nearly all the old Puritan churches. The First Church of 
Boston, John Cotton's, became Unitarian ; so did the Second 
Church, which throughout their lives the Mathers had held as 
such a stronghold of orthodoxy ; so, with less violence to 
its history, did the Brattle Street ; the only Boston church 
of consequence which held out was the Old South, which 
adhered to its pristine dogmas until 1899. '^^^ ancestral 
church of Cambridge broke in two ; and the section of its 
parishioners who deposed Abiel Holmes for faithfulness to his 
old creed captured both the meeting-house and the communion 
plate. Something similar occurred at Plymouth, where at the 
entrance of the oldest burying-ground of New England may 
now be seen two edifices, each of which claims direct descent 
from the earliest of all New England churches. One has 
maintained orthodoxy ; but the more impressive is that which 
followed the fashion and became Unitarian. 

This general conquest of ecclesiastical strongholds by the 
Unitarians deeply affected the whole structure of Massa- 
chusetts society. Elsewhere in America, perhaps, and surely 
in England, Unitarianism has generally presented itself as 
dissenting dissent, and has consequently been exposed to the 
kind of social disfavour which aggressive radicalism is apt 
anywhere to involve. In the isolated capital of isolated New 
England, on the other hand, where two centuries had es- 
tablished such a rigid social system, the capture of the old 
churches meant the capture, too, of almost every social 
stronghold. In addition to its inherent charm, the pristine 
Unitarianism of Massachusetts was strengthened by all the 
force of fashion in a community where somewhat eccentric 
fashion has always had great weight. Whoever clung to 
the older faith did so at his social peril. 



UNITARIANISM 289 

This fact is nowhere more evident than in the his'tory 
of New England letters. Almost everybody who attained 
literary distinction in New England during the nineteenth 
century was either a Unitarian or closely associated with Uni- 
tarian influences. The single man of letters whom Boston 
orthodoxy produced was poor A^illis ; and he found the social 
atmosphere of New England too stifling for the convivial son 
of an orthodox deacon. At least in letters, which throughout 
the literary dominance of New England preserved there the 
same kind of social distinction that marked Mr. Bryant's ca- 
reer in New York, creative energy declared itself chiefly among 
those who had been taught to believe themselves created in 
the image of the Creator. 



m 



• TRANSCENDENTALISM 

Though we have followed the oratory, the scholarship, and 
the Unitarianism of New England almost to the present time, 
there has been reason for considering them before the other 
phases of Renaissance in that isolated region where the nine- 
teenth century produced such a change. At various times we 
have touched on the fact that the period from 1798 to 1832 — 
marked in England by everything between the " Lyrical Bal- 
lads " and the death of Scott, and in America by all the New 
York literature from Brockden Brown to Bryant — really com- 
prised an epoch in the literary history of both countries. It 
was during this period that the three phases of intellectual 
life which we have now considered fully declared themselves 
in New England ; and in these years nothing else of equal 
importance developed there. 

The very mention of the dates in question should remind us 
that throughout the English-speaking world the revolutionary 
spirit was in the air. It showed itself in the extreme individu- 
alism of literature in England, where the writers suddenly 
became almost as unlike one another as those of the preceding 
century had been similar ; it showed itself there in that consti- 
tutional revolution which finally resulted in the Reform Bill ; 
and in native American letters it showed itself in the some- 
what imitative but soundly sweet writings of Brockden Brown, 
Irving, Cooper, and Bryant. The contrast between these and 
the contemporary writings of England may already have sug- 
gested a marked difference in the societies to which, as we 
can now see, the revolutionary spirit came at the same time. 



TRANSCENDENTALISM 291 

The essence of this spirit is its fervid faith in the excellence 
of human nature; let men be freed from all needless con- 
trol, it holds, and they may be trusted to work out their 
admirable salvation. In the old world, where the force of 
custom had been gathering for immemorial centuries, the 
speech and behaviour of enfranchised humanity was apt to 
take extravagant form. In America, on the ^her hand, 
where the one thing which had been most lacking was the 
semblance of polite civilisation, the very impulse which in 
Europe showed itself destructive appeared in a guise which 
at first makes it hard to recognise. 

One need not ponder long, however, to feel, even in this 
staid new America, a note as fresh as was the most extrava- 
gant revolutionary expression in Europe. Our elaborately 
rhetorical oratory, to be sure, and our decorous scholarship, 
seem on the surface far from revolutionary ; and so does the 
gently insignificant literature which was contemporary with 
them a bit further south. Yet all alike were as different from 
anything which America had uttered before as was the poetry 
of Wordsworth or of Shelley from what had previously been 
known in England. When we came to the Unitarianism of 
New England, the revolutionary spirit showed itself more 
plainly. The creed of Channing was of a kind which, except 
for the unusual chance of immediate social dominance, might 
almost at once have revealed its disintegrant character. Hap- 
pening, as it did, however, to possess itself of the ecclesiastical 
system established by generations of ancestral orthodoxy, it 
produced at first no more obvious superficial change than a 
refreshing amelioration of the prospects visible from the good 
old Boston pulpits. 

The enfranchised human nature of New England, too, at 
first expressed itself in no more appalling forms than the 
oratory of Webster or of Everett ; than the Anthology Club, 
the Boston Athenaeum, and the " North American Review ; " 
than the saintly personality and the ethereal speculations of 



292 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

Channing. Under such revolutionary influences as these the 
new generation of Boston grew up, which was to find expres- 
sion a few years later. 

In all such considerations as this there is danger of taking 
consecutive phases of development too literally. To say that 
Unitarianism caused the subsequent manifestation of free 
thought in New England would be too muchj but no one 
can doubt that the world-wide revolutionary spirit, of which 
the first New England manifestation was the religious revolu- 
tion effected by Unitarianism, impelled the following genera- 
tion to that outbreak of intellectual and spiritual anarchy which 
is generally called Transcendentalism. 

This queerly intangible Transcendentalism can best be 
understood, indeed, by recurring to the text of Channing's 
celebrated sermon on Unitarian Christianity. " Prove all 
things," asserted the cheerful theologian ; " hold fast that 
which is good." Prove all things ; do not accept tradition ; 
scrutinise whatever presents itself to you. If evil, though de- 
fended by the Bible itself, cast it aside ; if good, even though 
the Bible utterly neglect it, cherish it as a gift of God. To 
this principle Channing adhered all his life ; but Channing's 
life was essentially clerical ; it was that of a conscientious 
and disinterested religious teacher, whose great personal au- 
thority was strengthened by rare purity of nature. Educated 
in something like the old school of theology, he generally con- 
secrated his devout boldness of thought to religious matters. 

In the generation which grew up under the influence of 
which Channing is the most distinguished type, the revolutionary 
spirit declared itself more broadly. The traditional education 
of New England had been confined to theology, to classics 
and mathematics, and to the Common Law. So far as it had 
indulged itself in speculative philosophy, it had treated this as 
ancillary, mostly to theology and sometimes to jurisprudence. 
Meanwhile it had paid little attention to the modern literature 
even of England, and none at all to that of other languages 



TRANSCENDENTALISM 293 

than English. Obviously there were many things in this 
world which intelligent young Yankees might advantageously 
prove, with a view to discovering whether they were worth 
holding fast. To say that they did so in obedience to Chan- 
ning's specific teachings would be mistaken ; but certainly in 
obedience to the same motive which induced his choice of 
that Thessalonian text, the more active and vigorous young 
minds of New England attacked, wherever they could find 
them, the records of human wisdom. They wished to make 
up their own minds as to what they believed about the eterni- 
ties, and to do so with no more deference to any authority 
than that authority seemed rationally to deserve. 

The name commonly given to the unsystematised results at 
which they arrived — widely differing with every individual — 
is apt. However they differed, these impulsive and untrained 
philosophical thinkers of renascent New England were idealists. 
With the aid of reading as wide as their resources would allow, 
they endeavoured to give themselves an account of what the 
universe really means. They became aware that our senses 
perceive only the phenomena of life, and that behind these 
phenomena, beyond the range of human senses, lurk things 
not phenomenal. The evolutionary philosophy which has 
followed theirs holds a similar conception ; it divides all things 
into two groups, — the phenomenal or knowable, concerning 
which our knowledge can be tested by observation or experi- 
ment, and the unknowable, concerning which no observation 
or experiment can prove anything. With scientific hardness 
of head evolutionary philosophy consequently confines its 
energies to phenomena. With unscientific enthusiasm for 
freedom the first enfranchised thinkers of New England 
troubled themselves little about phenomena, and devoted their 
energies to thinking and talking about that great group of un- 
demonstrable truths which must always transcend human 
experience. In so doing, we can see now, they followed an 
instinct innate in their race. They were descended from two 



294 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

centuries of Puritanism ; and though the Puritans exerted 
their philosophic thought within dogmatically fixed limits, 
they were intense idealists, too. Their whole temperamental 
energy was concentrated in efforts definitely to perceive abso- 
lute truths quite beyond the range of any earthly senses. The 
real distinction between the Puritan idealists and the Trans- 
cendental idealists of the nineteenth century proves little more 
than that these discarded all dogmatic limit. 

A typical example of the state of things which ensued 
lately transpired in the talk of a Bostonian, educated more 
than fifty years ago under Transcendental influences, but long 
since become an earnest Christian. Some discussion of meta- 
physics arising, he gravely said that of course no one doubted 
human nature to be quadruple, — consisting of mind, body, 
soul, and spirit. The distinction between mind and body is 
generally familiar, and that which separates the soul from 
these is nowise strange to any one familiar with the Trans- 
cendental period ; but what the difference may be between soul 
and spirit only a Transcendentalist could ever have told you. 
Yet this dogmatic assertion of old Transcendentalism had sur- 
vived as unquestioned truth in a mind which for years had been 
devoutly obedient to orthodox Christianity. Idealists, hke 
this, making dogmatic assertions about unknowable things, 
pretty much all the Transcendentalists were. 

A second agreement among them one can generally assert : 
almost all believed in innate ideas. Such a belief, of course, 
is inherent in the doctrine of conscience so vigorously main- 
tained by Channing. Metaphysically the matter is endlessly 
disputable, belonging to the region where proof is out of the 
question. Do men come into the world with blank minds on 
which images are impressed by the accidents of our earthly 
experience ? or are they born with certain ideas, definitely and 
unchangeably true ? The question has been discussed and per- 
haps will be discussed by many schools of philosophy. Trans- 
cendentalism did not trouble itself with much formal discussion. 



TRANSCENDENTALISM 295 

It assumed innate ideas ; it found no reason for questioning 
the assumption ; and the innate ideas which it most insisted 
on concerned not so much body and mind as soul and spirit. 
Just as the normal body is born with a sense of touch or of 
sight, the Transcendentalists held, the normal soul and spirit are 
born with a sense of right and wrong. So, less certainly but 
very probably, the normal mind is born with a sense of truth 
and falsehood. Very good ; when a question is presented, 
all you need do is to inquire of yourself whether it is true. 
Answer yourself earnestly, and the question is settled. This 
is particularly true when the question concerns right and 
wrong. Human nature is good ; you are made right, — mind, 
body, soul, spirit, and all. Obey yourself, and you need have 
no fear. All things worth serious interest transcend human 
experience ; but a trustworthy clew to them is to be found 
in the unfathomable excellence of human minds, souls, and 
spirits. 

Though very possibly no single Transcendentalist would 
have accepted so baldly stated a creed, some such system may 
be conceived as the Platonic ideal toward which Transcenden- 
talists generally tended. You can understand them best by 
comparing one and all with such a generalised type, which 
no one precisely represented. With a temper which, how- 
ever it began, soon developed into this hopefully impalpable 
philosophy, the more ardent youths who grew up in Boston 
when its theology was dominated by Unitarianism, and when 
its scholarship was at last so enlarged as to include the whole 
range of human learning, faced whatever human records they 
could find, to prove and to hold fast those which were good. 

The influences thus brought to bear on New England 
were almost innumerable, but among them two or three were 
specially evident. The most important was probably German 
thought, at a time when German philosophy was most meta- 
physical and German literature most romantic. This, in- 
deed, had had great influence on contemporary England. No 



296 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

two men of letters in the nineteenth century affected English 
thought more evidently than Coleridge and Carlyle j, and 
both were saturated with German philosophy. To New 
England these influences swiftly spread. In 1800, it has 
been said, hardly a German book could be found in Boston. 
Before Channing died, in 1842, you could find in Boston few 
educated people who could not talk with glib delight about 
German philosophy, German literature, and German music. 
Another thing which appears very strongly in Transcendental 
writings is the influence of French eclectic philosophy. At 
one time the names of Jouffroy and Cousin were as familiar 
to Yankee ears as were those of Locke or Descartes or Kant. 
Perhaps more heartily still this whole school of enthusiastic 
seekers for truth welcomed that wide range of modern liter- 
ature, English and foreign alike, which was at last thrown 
open by contemporary scholars so distinct from them In 
temper as the Smith Professors, — Ticknor and Longfellow 
and Lowell. 

For this almost riotous delight in pure literature there was 
a reason now long past. The Puritans generally had con- 
scientious objections to fine art. So only at the moment to 
which we are now come could the instinct of native New 
England for fine art conscientiously be satisfied. Now, the 
fine arts, however else they may be classified, may pretty 
certainly be divided into two groups : those of which the 
masterpieces may be indefinitely reproduced and those of 
which each masterpiece must inevitably remain unique. 
Architecture, for example, must remain permanently settled 
on the foundations laid for each building ; a great painting 
can exist only in the one place where it is actually hung, 
and a great statue in that where it actually stands. During 
the last twenty or thirty years, to be sure, the astonishing 
development of photography has to some degree extended the 
range of plastic arts. Until long after the Transcendental 
period, however, processes of reproduction were at once so 



TRANSCENDENTALISM 2()7 

costly and so uncertain that architecture, painting, and sculp- 
ture could be appreciatively studied and enjoyed only by people 
who could travel to w^here masterpieces exist. With music 
the case was decidedly different. Musical scores can be car- 
ried anywhere ; so in general can musical instruments ; and 
provided that you brought to New England proper scores, 
proper instruments, and tolerably trained musicians, you could 
have in New England pretty good music. When it came 
to poetry, things were better still. All you had to do was to 
import the books in which the masterpieces of poetry were 
printed ; then every educated man could read the masterpieces 
for himself. 

Nowadays music and literature are as familiar in Boston 
as anywhere in the world ; and along with this familiarity has 
come, as always comes, a definite standard of taste, which 
combines with awe-stricken respect for established reputations 
to make everyday people feel more at ease in the presence of 
works which need not be taken seriously. Seventy years 
ago the Renaissance of New England was in no aspect more 
typically renascent than in the unfeigned eagerness with which 
its love of novelty delighted in the excellences of those newly 
found fine arts, poetry and music. The masterpieces of 
music gave people some such unfeigned delight as is now 
found only in popular tunes. The masterpieces of poetry 
similarly delighted them as genuinely and as spontaneously 
as nowadays people are delighted by sensational novels, or 
plays from the French. Scholarly criticism had not yet 
murdered spontaneous appreciation. The Transcendental 
youth of New England delighted in excellent modern litera- 
ture and excellent modern music as unaffectedly as fifteenth- 
century Italians delighted in the freshly discovered manuscripts 
of classic Greek. 

At the same time these Transcendentalists were native 
Yankees ; and true native Yankees always yearn for abso- 
lute truth. A characteristic result followed ; they really de- 



298 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

lighted in literature with all the fervour of a race which had 
been aesthetically starved for five or six generations j with 
equal fervour they believed their interest in literature to be 
largely conditioned by the fact that literature can teach us 
how we ought to behave. 

In the second number of the " Dial " is a paper, attributed 
to Emerson, which oddly illustrates this. He speaks of doubts 
which may linger concerning the excellence of the age in which 
he has the good fortune to flourish ; and goes on thus : — 

" How can the age be a bad one which gives me Plato and Paul 
and Plutarch, Saint Augustine, Spinoza, Chapman, Beaumont and 
Fletcher, Donne, and Sir Thomas Browne, beside its own riches ? " 

Whether Emerson wrote this passage or not, his collected 
works teem with similar evidence of his guileless confusion of 
values, a trait strongly characteristic of our earlier Renais- 
sance. His father and his grandfather, and those who had 
gone before, had known their Bibles, their Latin classics, and 
perhaps a little Greek, had had fairly distinct notions of the 
Common Law, and had regarded Beaumont and Fletcher, if 
they had ever heard of them, as sinfully obscene playwrights. 
Emerson, turning to Beaumont and Fletcher, found what is 
truly there, — many examples of noble and beautiful Eliza- 
bethan aphorism. He might equally have found what his 
ancestral tradition emphasised, endless depths of corruption ; 
but these did not attract his attention. The inner light told 
him that the beauties were virtues and the basenesses faults. 
He chose to regard the beauty as essential, the baseness as 
accidental ; and in his admiration for the superb phrasing of 
decadent Elizabethan dramatists he threw them into the same 
category with Plato and Augustine, in a temper much like that 
which has made dogmatic theology group the Song of Solo- 
mon with the Epistles of the apostle Paul. 

By 1832 a considerable group of Transcendentalists had 
arisen in Boston, agreeing in little else than the eager scope of 



TRANSCENDENTALISM 299 

their interest and investigations, and their desire to attain ab- 
solute truth by other means than that of previously accepted 
authority. In a certain aspect, as we have seen, their impulse 
closely resembled that of the Unitarians half a generation be- 
fore. It may be distinguished from Unitarianism, however, by 
its unrestrained ardour. In this the Transcendentalists un- 
wittingly reverted to the old native type. With the Unitarians 
they held, though not literally, that man is made in God's 
image. Very well : God, morally perfect, has only to look 
within Himself and know what is true and right ; let us, 
made in His image, do likewise. Truth and Right are ab- 
solute things ; we shall find them within ourselves, and from 
their deepest essential nature they cannot mislead us. The 
Puritans, of course, had strenuously denied any such dogma 
as this ; the light which God vouchsafed to them was vouch- 
safed through no secret faculties of their forlornly lost human 
nature, but only in scriptural phrases, which must be duly 
interpreted by orthodox parsons. During the heyday of the 
Puritans, however, there had flourished a kind of spiritual 
thinkers as like them in temperament as they were different in 
doctrine, and therefore held the most dangerous of heretics. 
These were the Quakers, like Woolman, who measured truth 
by that inner light which they believed that the grace of God 
vouchsafes to every human being. The Transcendentalists 
were too far from orthodox to trouble themselves about a 
Christian God, but they believed in the inner light as enthusi- 
astically as ever Quakers did, and they followed it almost as 
ardently. 

The intensity of their emotional nature not only distin- 
guished them from contemporary Unitarians, but carried 
them to greater lengths than even their Puritan ancestors. 
When Unitarians got beyond the range of human senses, they 
phrased the unknowable almost as conventionally as the Puri- 
tans themselves, talking of God, of Heaven, of Hell ; and so 
did the Quakers. The Transcendentalists, with all the en- 



300 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

franchisee! ardour of revolutionary temper, taliced rather about 
Nature and the Over-Soul ; and instead of yielding enthusi- 
astic assent to the divinely implanted authority of conscience, 
they found that the ideas innate in the human soul and spirit 
gave w^arrant enough for unquestioning belief in the un- 
fathomable truths which they so boldly proclaimed. 

In one w^ay or another this Transcendental movement 
affected almost all the ardent natures of Nevi' England from 
1825 to 1840. In that year it found final expression in the 
"Dial," a quarterly periodical which flourished until 1844. 
Its first editor was among the most characteristic figures of 
Transcendentalism. This was a woman, regarded in her 
own time as the prophetess of the new movement, and pre- 
vented by a comparatively early death from struggling through 
days when the movement had spent its force. 

Sarah Margaret Fuller, daughter of an eccentric but very 
assertive citizen of Cambridge, was born in 18 10. Educated 
by her father according to his own ideas, she was much over- 
stimulated in youth, and grew into something which impressed 
people who disliked her as intellectual monstrosity. She was 
early a teacher and a writer. She contracted with Emer- 
son a Platonically intimate friendship, of which the records 
enliven the humours of this period. And among her most 
characteristic proceedings was a series of conversations to 
which for a year or two she invited people to subscribe. The 
subscribers were duly admitted to her small drawing-room, 
where she proceeded to talk about all manner of literary and 
intellectual things, until you could hardly tell whether she 
were more like an unsexed version of Plato's Socrates or a 
Yankee Lyceum lecturer. In 1840 she became editor of the 
" Dial." In 1842 she relinquished the editorship to Emerson, 
and removed to New York. Horace Greeley, whose sym- 
pathy with New England reformers was always encouraging, 
had invited her to become the literary critic of the New 
York « Tribune." 



TRANSCENDENTALISM 301 

Two years later she went abroad. Up to this time the 
records of her life indicate deficiency of passion. In the 
little time which followed, her passion so asserted itself that, 
had she survived, her later work might have been surpris- 
ingly different from what she actually left us. She strayed 
to Italy, where in the revolutionary times of 1847 ^^^ married 
a gentleman named Ossoli, an Italian patriot some years 
younger than she. The marriage was kept secret, amid the 
stormy hopes and fears of reviving Italy, until her approach 
to confinement compelled her to admit it. She was in Rome 
during the siege of 1848, and two years later started for 
America with her husband, virtually an exile, and her child. 
The ship on which they were journeying was wrecked off 
Fire Island; all three were lost. 

An obviously extravagant legend about her indicates at once 
something of how Transcendentalists presented themselves to 
other people and perhaps a little of their real temper. As we 
may remember, one of the poems which Poe approvingly 
remarked among those of the New York Literati was written 
by a certain Mrs. Osgood about Fanny Ellsler. This same 
Fanny Ellsler danced in Boston ; and there is said to be in the 
" Dial " a grave argument that in spite of her personal errors 
it was morally permissible to see and admire her performances 
as an artist. The story runs that, in obedience to this moral 
right and aesthetic duty, Emerson and Margaret Fuller went 
together to see the most accomplished ballet-dancer of the 
'40's. Neither of them had ever seen a ballet before; neither 
knew quite what to expect. The dance began; both sat 
serenely silent ; at last Emerson spoke. " Margaret," he said, 
"this is poetry." "No, Waldo," replied Margaret, "it is 
not poetry, it is religion." 

This Margaret Fuller was the first editor of the " Dial." 
Its precise purpose is hard to state; it may best be grouped 
with that little company of evanescent periodicals, which now 
and then endeavour to afford everybody a full opportunity 



302 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

to say anything. The deepest agreement of Transcendental- 
ism was in the conviction that the individual has a natural 
right to believe for himself and freely to express his belief. 
In a community so dominated by tradition as New England, 
meanwhile, a community of which the most characteristic 
periodical up to this time had been the "North American Re- 
view," freedom of speech in print, though not theoretically 
denied, was hardly practicable. With a mission little more 
limited than this ideal of freedom, the " Dial " started. 

The cover of the first number was distinguished by a single 
advertisement, — that of Mr. Jacob Abbott's Rollo books, then 
publishing by the same printer. This happy accident can 
hardly fail to suggest the reflection that Rollo was the body 
of which Transcendentalism was the soul. Whoever wishes 
to know the external aspect of the period now in question 
will waste none of the moments which he may devote to Mr. 
Abbott's luminous pages. Nor will time be wasted which 
those whose curiosity is less centred on phenomena may find 
themselves able to give to the " Dial " itself. For though 
the " Dial " was impractical, never circulated much, and 
within four years came to a hopeless financial end, its pages 
are at once more interesting and more sensible than tradition 
has represented them. Of the writers, to be sure, few have 
proved immortal. Bronson Alcott and Theodore Parker 
seem fading with Margaret Fuller into mere memories ; 
and George Ripley has become more nebulous still. 
But Thoreau was of the company ; and so was Emerson, who 
bids fair to survive the rest much as Shakspere has survived 
the other Elizabethan dramatists. 

This is perhaps what now makes the " Dial " most signifi- 
cant. No eminent literary figure can grow into existence 
without a remarkable environment ; and as the pages of the 
" Dial " gradually reveal what the environment of Emerson's 
most active years was, it proves on the whole more vigorous 
than you would have been apt to expect. Its vigour, however, 



TRANSCENDENTALISM 303 

appears more plainly in the earlier volumes of the " Dial " 
than in the later. Up to the time when the periodical was 
founded, the general temper for which it stands had been 
gathering force. Merely as literature, then, the first two 
or three numbers are surprisingly good. As you turn the 
pages of the later numbers you are sensible of disintegration. 
The thought tends to grow more vague ; the kinds of reform 
which interest people grow more various and wilder ; and, 
above all, the tendency, so fatal to periodical literature, of 
running to inordinate length, becomes more and more evi- 
dent. You begin to feel as if each writer would have liked 
to write the whole thing himself. The " Dial " begins with 
an auroral glow, which soon fades into a rather bewildering 
mist. From beginning to end, however, it is fresh in feel- 
ing, wide in scope, earnest in its search for truth, and less 
eccentric than you would have thought possible. For all its 
ultimate failure, it leaves a final impression not only of auroral 
hopefulness, but of moral sanity. 

Tradition has remembered about it chiefly such oddities as 
the " Orphic Sayings " of Bronson Alcott, — " awful sayings," 
they have since been called, in days when the adjective " awful" 
had attained its cant meaning. There is room for grave doubt 
whether Alcott ever knew what some of them meant; certainly 
no one else ever knew, and for many years no one has wanted 
to know. Tradition has remembered, too, Emerson's ten- 
dency in the later numbers to lay before the world the inspired 
truths of other scriptures than the Christian, — Chinese, In- 
dian, whatever else. At the same time tradition has forgotten 
the more solid and contemporary stuff that appeared there. In 
the second number, for example, among other things, Mr. 
George Ripley has much to say about that Unitarian ortho- 
doxy against which Channing himself was protesting ; and 
in the course of his article Ripley uses concerning his awak- 
ened New England the words " new life," in just the sense 
in which we have found the word " Renaissance " so truly 



304 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

to express the spirit of the moment. A little later a writer 
believed to be Margaret Fuller expounds that Christianity is a 
prison ; not long afterwards Theodore Parker, remembered 
as the most radical of the divines who still called themselves 
Unitarian, stoutly insists on the inexpressible merit of Christ 
as an example. In subsequent numbers of the first year 
there are articles on abolition, — a movement which logi- 
cally enlisted the sympathies of almost all who were affected 
by the Transcendental movement ; and Theodore Parker, 
radical from beginning to end, has some thoughts on labour 
by no means welcome to his conservative contemporaries. 
In the later volumes theoretical socialism comes more and 
more to the front, and there is a good deal about the com- 
munity at Brook Farm in which a considerable number of 
Transcendentalists found material expression for their en- 
thusiasm. Along with such articles as these there is much 
poetry, on the whole worth reading. Little of it is excellent ; 
the best of course is Emerson's, mostly reprinted again and 
again. If not great, however, the poetry of the " Dial " is 
genuine, — a sincere effort on the part of increasingly culti- 
vated people earnestly and beautifully to phrase emotions which 
in their freshly enfranchised New England they truly felt. 

Though the " Dial " had little positive cohesion, its writers 
and all the Transcendentalists, of whom we may take them as 
representative, were almost at one as ardent opponents of life- 
less traditions. Generally idealists, and believers in innate 
ideas, they were stirred to emotional fervour by their detesta- 
tion of any stiffening orthodoxy, even though that orthodoxy 
were so far from dogmatic as Yankee Unitarianism. And 
naturally passing from things of the mind and the soul to 
things of that very palpable part of human nature, the body, 
they found themselves generally eager to alter the affairs of 
this world for the better. If any one word could certainly 
arouse their sympathetic enthusiasm, it was the word " re- 
form." 



TRANSCENDENTALISM 305 

Whoever at any moment contemplates life is bound to 
find many displeasing things. He is bound to find at the 
same time a perceptible infusion of merit and virtue. Thus 
contemplating the mazed and confusing panorama of exist- 
ence, some people shrink from any effort radically to alter 
the condition of human aff^airs ; for bad as things are, alteration 
may by chance involve more destruction of good than sup- 
pression of evil. To reformers, on the other hand, the 
darker aspect of actual affairs seems the more conspicuous 
They are always for putting down the evil, trusting that the 
good shall survive by its inherent strength ; and when reform 
takes up arms, we have revolutions. Transcendentalists never 
thought of resorting to arms ; but they did eagerly inspect life, 
and finding there many unsatisfactory things, they eagerly 
welcomed any effort to make things better, without much 
question as to how practicable that effort was, or as to what 
it might incidentally destroy. A glance at the contents of 
the " Dial " will accordingly show that the periodical fervently 
advocated two distinct reforms. The more specific, which 
reached its highest development later, was the abolition of 
slavery, a measure important enough in the intellectual history 
of New England to deserve separate discussion. The more 
general, which developed, flourished, and failed decidedly before 
the antislavery movement became a political force, was that 
effort to reform the structure of society which found expres- 
sion in the community of Brook Farm near Boston. 

In 1 84 1, a number of people, — all in sympathy with the 
Transcendentalists, and most of them writers for the " Dial," — 
among the more conspicuous of whom were Mr. George Rip- 
ley, Mr. Charles Anderson Dana, and Mr. John Sullivan 
D wight, bought a farm ten or twelve miles from Boston. 
Here they proposed to found an ideal community, where 
everybody should work to support the establishment and 
where there should be plenty of leisure for scholarly and 
edifying pleasure. Incidentally there was to be a school, 

20 



3o6 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

where children from their earliest years were to give their 
infantile help in the work of the community. The experi- 
ment began. At least during its earlier years, Brook Farm 
attracted considerable notice, and the sympathetic attention of 
many people afterward more eminent than its actual mem- 
bers. Hawthorne came thither for a while, and his " Blithe- 
dale Romance " is an idealised picture of the establishment. 
Emerson, though never an actual member, was there off and 
on, always with shrewd, kindly interest. Thither, too, occa- 
sionally came Margaret Fuller, in whom some have discovered 
the original of Hawthorne's Zenobia. But if Margaret Fuller 
really suggested Zenobia, Zenobia is probably Hawthorne's 
most wonderful creation. For Zenobia is profoundly femi- 
nine ; and whatever else poor Margaret Fuller seems, at least 
until after her passionate marriage, she seems so lost in 
Transcendental abstraction that nothing short of genius could 
connect with her the idea of sex. 

Brook Farm, of course, was only a Yankee expression of 
the world-old impulse to get rid of evil by establishing life on 
principles different from those of economic law. From earliest 
times, theoretical writers have proposed various forms of com- 
munistic existence as a solution of the problems presented 
by the sin and suffering of human beings in any dense popu- 
lation. The writer whose principles most definitely affected 
Brook Farm in its later development was Fourier, a French 
philosopher, who sketched out a rather elaborate ideal society. 
The basis of his system was that people should separate them- 
selves into phalanxes of no considerable numbers, and that 
each phalanx should be mutually helpful and self-supporting. 
This conception so commended itself to the Brook P'armers 
that, at an expense decidedly beyond their means, they actu- 
ally built a phalanstery, or communal residence, as nearly as 
might be on the lines which Fourier suggested. 

What marked the peculiarly Yankee character of the 
Brook Farmers, was their calm disregard of a vital point in 



TRANSCENDENTALISM 307 

Fourier's system. There can be no doubt that a consider- 
able part of human unhappiness is caused by the loves of 
men and women. This phase of unhappiness some theorists 
would avoid by lifelong celibacy. Fourier less austerely 
avoided it by introducing into his phalansteric system a 
decent variety of free love, whereby adult men and women 
should be permitted to live together as long as they found 
it mutually agreeable, and to separate without inconvenient 
formalities whenever mutually so inclined, thus perpetuating 
an ideal race in obedience to unimpeded affinities of nature. 
When the Brook Farmers arrived at this phase of Fourier's 
applied philosophy, they simply ignored it. Cynical con- 
temporaries rather looked for a development of free love in 
a community whose principles so clearly involved this form 
of freedom as well as those which they openly advocated. 
Nothing of the kind appeared. However absurd, however 
eccentric and irritating. Brook Farm may have seemed to 
people of strong sense, it passed from beginning to end 
without scandal. People who were married lived there as 
respectable married people should ; unmarried people lived there 
with all that unaffected purity of personal life which is so 
generally characteristic of the better classes throughout America. 
The same native trait which appears in the absence of lubricity 
from American writings appears again in the fact that at 
Brook Farm, freely given over to theoretical socialism and 
to the teachings of Fourier, men and women lived sweet, 
clean lives. You might have watched them throughout the 
seven years of their communal existence, you might have 
listened to every word which they uttered about the teach- 
ings of their revered French apostle ; but unless you had 
turned to Fourier's own writings, you would never have 
found reason to suspect that among his teachings was the 
doctrine of free love. 

Brook Farm inevitably went to pieces. Its members were 
not skilled enough in agriculture to make farming pay ; they 



3o8 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

found manual labour too exhausting to permit much activity 
of mind in the considerable leisure which their system afforded 
them ; they discovered no new truths ; and incidentally they 
discerned with more and more certainty that when you get 
together even so small a company of human beings as are 
comprised in one of Fourier's phalanxes, you cannot avoid 
uncomfortable incompatibility of temper. In 1847 their new 
phalanstery, which had cost ten thousand dollars and had 
almost exhausted their funds, was burned down ; it was 
not insured, and before long the whole community had to 
break up. 

The " Dial " had come to its innocent end three years 
before. Transcendentalism proved unable long to express 
itself in any coherent form. Yet many of those who were 
connected with it never relapsed into commonplace. Emerson's 
career we shall consider in a little detail, and Hawthorne's, too, 
when the time comes. Margaret Fuller hardly survived the 
period of which she was so conspicuous an ornament ; when 
Brook Farm faded away, she was already in Italy. She had 
gone thither by way of New York, whither she had been in- 
vited by Mr. Horace Greeley's sympathy with all sorts of 
New England reform. Greeley also had something to do 
with the settlement in New York of two eminent Brook 
Farmers. One was Mr. George Ripley, perhaps the chief 
spirit of the community. He began life as a Unitarian 
minister, and with the possible exception of Theodore Parker 
was the most cultivated Boston divine of his day. He 
found even the Unitarian ministry too narrow in its ortho- 
doxy. When Brook Farm proved impracticable, he became 
the literary critic of the New York " Tribune," with which 
he retained his connection to the end of a long and honour- 
able life. His wife, who began in ardent sympathy with him, 
became a devout Roman Catholic. Mr. Ripley himself 
developed into a completely free-thinking and agreeably 
accomplished man of the world. Mr. Charles Dana, too, was 



TRANSCENDENTALISM 309 

for a while connected with the " Tribune." After a varied 
career, he finally became editor of the New York " Sun," 
which in his day enjoyed the reputation of being at once the most 
unprincipled and the most readable newspaper in America. 
Mr. George William Curtis became associated with the 
periodicals published by the Harpers, maintaining more of the 
purely ideal quality of his early days. Mr. Dwight returned 
to Boston, where, as editor of the " Journal of Music," he 
did rather more than any one else to make the city what it is 
now acknowledged to be, — a vital centre of musical art. 
And so in various ways Brook Farm faded into a memory, 
but one which always remained dear to those who knew the 
dreamy old days as they flitted through the sunshine. For 
though in one sense the movement came to nothing, it was an 
earnest, sincere, beautiful effort to make human life better by 
practising the principles of ideal truth. Brook Farm was 
typical of all Transcendentalism. It had a bright beginning, 
a rather bewildering adolescence, and a confused, misty end ; 
but it left no one the worse for its influence. 

This New England Transcendentalism developed most 
vigorously in those years when the intellectual life of New 
York was embodied in the Knickerbocker school of writers. 
By contrasting these two neighbouring phases of thought 
we can see how unalterably New England kept the trace of 
its Puritan origin, eagerly aspiring to knowledge of absolute 
truth. The literature of the Knickerbocker school was never 
more than a literature of pleasure. Even the lesser literature 
of Transcendentalism, not to speak of its permanent phases, 
constantly and earnestly aspired to be a literature of both 
knowledge and power, seeking in the eternities for new ranges 
of truth which should broaden, sweeten, strengthen, and purify 
mankind. 

In brief, just as Unitarianism represents the temporary 
orthodoxy of renascent New England, Transcendentalism 
represents its vagrant spiritual philosophy. Mr. Cabot, in his 



3IO THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

biography of Emerson, calls the movement an outburst oi 
Romanticism ; by " Romanticism " he means something very 
like what we have called the revolutionary spirit, — a phase 
of that world movement which had shown itself in Europe 
more than a generation before. On Continental Europe 
this had expressed itself in the excesses of the French Revo- 
lution. In England it had expressed itself in that outburst 
of romantic poetry which made the first third of the nine- 
teenth century a distinct epoch in English letters. The 
human nature of New England meanwhile asserted its inde- 
pendence of tradition in the vagaries of an ideal philosophy, 
and in a fervid assertion of the right of individuals to seek 
truth each for himself. This enfranchised Yankee human 
nature may perhaps seem vague, untutored, far from wise; 
but whatever its errors, and whatever the limits of its good 
sense, one fact about Transcendentalism must be evident 
even to those who are most sensible of its humourous 
aspect. Throughout it was aspiring ; and its aspiration had 
a touch of almost unearthly sweetness and purity. The 
old dogmas of the Puritans had taught that uncontrolled 
human nature must instantly reveal itself as damnable. To 
any honest mind the human nature of nineteenth-century New 
England, in the first enfranchisement of Transcendentalism, 
must seem as far from damnable as if damnation had never 
darkened the dreams of humanity. 



VI 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

As time passes, it grows more and more clear that by far the 
most eminent figure among the Transcendentalists, if not 
indeed in all the literary history of America, was Ralph Waldo 
Emerson. Born at Boston in 1803, ^^^ descended from a 
long line of ministers, he was as truly a New England Brahmin 
as was Cotton Mather, a century and a half before. His 
father was minister of the First Church of Boston, already 
Unitarian, but still maintaining unbroken the organisation 
which had been founded by John Cotton at the settlement of 
the town. The elder Emerson died early. His sons were 
brought up in poverty ; but they belonged on both sides to 
that hereditary clerical class whose distinction was still inde- 
pendent of so material an accident as fortune. In 1821 Waldo 
Emerson graduated from Harvard College, where, as his 
" Notes on Life and Letters in New England " record, the 
teaching of Edward Everett was filling the air with renascent 
enthusiasm. After graduation Emerson supported himself for 
a few years by school-teaching, studying meanwhile his heredi- 
tary profession of divinity. In 1829 he was made colleague 
to the Reverend Henry Ware, Jr., pastor of the Second 
Church in Boston. This was the church which had re- 
mained for above sixty years in charge of the Mathers. His 
ministerial career, then, began in lineal succession to Cotton 
Mather's own. Mr. Ware, infirm in health, soon resigned ; 
and before Emerson was thirty years old, he had become the 
regular minister of the Second Church. 



312 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

On the 9th of September, 1832, he preached there the 
sermon which brought his pastoral career to a close. The 
subject was the Lord's Supper, and his text was : '' The king- 
dom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness and 
peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. Rom. xiv. 17." — "In 
the history of the Church," he begins, " no subject has been 
more fruitful of controversy than the Lord's Supper. There 
never has been any unanimity in the understanding of its 
nature, nor any uniformity in the mode of celebrating it." 
He goes on with a long paragraph stating various divergencies 
of custom in sacramental observance, and then proceeds : — 

" I allude to these facts only to show that, so far from the supper 
being a tradition in which men are fully agreed, there has always been 
the widest room for difference of opinions upon this particular. Hav- 
ing recently given particular attention to this subject, I was led to the 
conclusion that Jesus did not intend to establish an institution for 
perpetual observance when he ate the Passover with his disciples; 
and, further, to the opinion, that it is not expedient to celebrate it the 
way we do." 

The body of the sermon is devoted to a cool statement of 
his reasons for this conclusion and opinion ; and at the end 
comes the decision at which he had arrived : — 

"Influenced by these considerations, I have proposed to the 
brethren of the Church to drop the use of the elements and the 
claim of authority in the administration of this ordinance, and have 
suggested a mode in which a meeting for the same purpose might be 
held, free of objection. 

" My brethren have considered my views with patience and candour, 
and have recommended, unanimously, an adherence to the present 
form. I have therefore been compelled to consider whether it be- 
comes me to administer it. I am clearly of the opinion I ought not. 
This discourse has already been so far extended that I can only say 
that the reason of my determination is shortly this : — It is my desire, 
in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do 
with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all. I have no 
hostility to this institution; I am only stating my want of syropathy 
with it. Neither should I ever have obtruded this opinion upon other 
people, had I not been called by my office to administer it. That is 



EMERSON 313 

the end of my opposition, that I am not interested in it. I am con- 
tent that it stand to the end of the world, if it please men and please 
Heaven, and 1 shall rejoice in all the good it produces." 

" I am content that it should stand to the end of the 
world," but "I am not interested in it," — that is the view 
expressed of the holiest mystery of Christianity by a man who 
stood for three years in the pulpit of Cotton Mather. It is 
doubtful whether the whole literature of heresy contains two 
phrases which to any mind still affected by traditional Chris- 
tian faith must seem more saturated with serene insolence. 

Serenely insolent, at least to orthodox Christians, Emerson 
remained all his life. This life was far from eventful. After 
giving up his pastorate he supported himself as a lecturer, 
occasionally preaching; He went abroad for a year, begin- 
ning that friendship with Carlyle which resulted in their life- 
long correspondence. In 1836 appeared his first book, 
" Nature," beautiful, serene, obscure, stimulating, permeated 
with the idealism which was the basis of his philosophy. In 
1837 he gave, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard 
College, his celebrated address on " The American Scholar," 
of which the closing paragraph is among the most articulate 
assertions of his individualism : — 

" If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and 
there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience, — 
patience ; with the shades of all the good and great for company ; and 
for solace the perspective of your own infinite life ; and for work the 
study and communication of principles, the making those instincts 
prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in 
the world not to be an unit; — not to be reckoned one character; — 
not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, 
but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of 
the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted 
geographically, as the north or the south? Not so, brothers and 
friends,— please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own 
feet; we will work with our own hands ; we will speak our own minds. 
The study of letters shall no longer be a name for pity, for doubt, and 
for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall 
be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men 



314 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by 
the Divine Soul which also inspires all men." 

In the following year, his address before the Divinity 
School at Cambridge carried his gospel of individualism to a 
point vi^hich staggered even that heretical seminary. Full of 
theoretical liberalism, its authorities had deliberately invited 
to their baccalaureate pulpit a self-disfrocked divine, who had 
discarded the Lord's Supper because he happened not to find 
it interesting. What he said frightened Harvard theology it- 
self back toward at least Unitarian orthodoxy. Here are two 
bits of his unfettered exhortation : — 

" Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good 
models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and 
dare to love God without mediator or veil. . . . Thank God for these 
good men, but say, ' I also am a man.' Imitation cannot go above its 
model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The in- 
ventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a 
charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves 
himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's. 

" Yourself a new-born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all 
conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with the Deity. 

" I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty which ravished the 
souls of those eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through 
their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. 
The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences, that 
have been bread of life to millions. But they have no epical in- 
tegrity ; are fragmentary; are not shown in their order to the intel- 
lect. I look for the new Teacher that shall follow so far those shining 
laws that he shall see them come full circle ; shall see their rounding 
complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall 
see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and 
shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with 
Beauty, and with Joy." 

In such spirit as these earlier works show, he went on lec- 
turing and writing all his life, incidentally, it is said, displaying 
practical good sense. Although he never made a fortune, he 
managed to lay by more money than most of his literary 
contemporaries and to provide for a comfortable old age. He 



EMERSON 315 

lived until 1882. Plenty of Boston people not yet past mid- 
dle age still remember his figure, which so beautifully em- 
bodied the gracious dignity, the unpretentious scope, and the 
unassuming distinction of those who led the New England 
Renaissance. 

Emerson's work is so individual that you can probably get 
no true impression of it without reading deeply for yourself. 
To many this may be irksome. Like all powerful individ- 
ualities, his can hardly leave a reader indifferent ; you will be 
either attracted or repelled, and if repelled, the repulsion will 
very likely make the reading demand a strenuous act of will. 
But any student of American letters must force himself to the 
task; for Emerson, thinking, talking, writing, lecturing from 
that Concord where he lived during the greater part of his 
life, produced, in less than half a century, work which as time 
goes on and as the things which other men were making begin 
to fade, seems more and more sure of survival. America 
produced him ; and whether you like him or not, he is bound 
to live. 

As one grows familiar with his work, its most characteristic 
trait begins to seem one which in a certain sense is not indi- 
vidual at all, but rather is common to all phases of lasting 
literature. 

Classical immortality, of course, is demonstrable only by 
the lapse of cumulating ages. One thing, however, seems 
sure : in all acknowledged classics, — in the great works of 
antique literature, sacred and profane alike, and, to go no 
further, in the great poetry of Dante or of Shakspere, — there 
proves to reside a vitality which as the centuries pass shows 
itself less and less conditioned by the human circumstances 
of the writers. No literary expression was ever quite free 
from historical environment. Homer — one poet or many — 
belongs to the heroic age of Greece ; Virgil, or Horace, to 
Augustan Rome ; Dante to the Italy of Guelphs and Ghi- 
bellines ; Shakspere to Elizabethan England. But take at 



3i6 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

random any page from any of these, and you will find some- 
thing so broadly, pervasively, lastingly human, that generation 
after generation will read it on with no sense of the chang- 
ing epochs which have passed since the man who spoke this 
word and the men for whom it was spoken have rested in 
immortal slumber. In the work of Emerson, whatever its 
final value, there is something of this note. Every other 
writer at whom we have glanced, and almost every other 
at whom we shall glance hereafter, demands for understand- 
ing that we revive our sympathy with the fading or faded 
conditions which surrounded his conscious life. At best these 
other works, vitally contemporaneous in their own days, grow 
more and more old-fashioned. Emerson, on the other hand, 
from beginning to end, seems constantly modern, with a con- 
temporaneousness almost as perennial as that of Scripture 
itself. Though his work may lack something of true great- 
ness, it surely seems alive with such unconditioned freedom 
of temper as makes great literature so inevitably lasting. 

Take, for example, the first page at which a volume of his 
" Essays " chances to open, — that where the verse is printed 
with which he prefaced his essay on " Spiritual Laws " : — 

" The living Heaven thy prayers respect, 
House at once and architect, 
Quarrying man's rejected hours. 
Builds there with eternal towers ; 
Sole and self-commanded works, 
Fears not undermining days, 
Grows by decays. 
And, by famous might that lurks 
In reaction and recoil, 
Makes flame to freeze and ice to boil ; 
Forging, through swart arms of Offence, 
The silver seat of Innocence." 

What this means we may admit ourselves unable to under- 
stand; but with all due vexation or humility, we can hardly 
help feeling that here is not a word or even a lurking mood 



EMERSON 



317 



which might not have emerged from eldest human time, or 
might not as well emerge from the most remote human future 
our imagination can conceive. In essence throughout, Emer- 
son's work bids fair to disregard the passing of time ; its 
spirit seems httle more conditioned by the circumstances of 
nineteenth-century Concord or Boston than Homer's was by 
the old -^gean breezes. 

In form, on the other hand, Emerson's work seems almost 
as certainly local. Broadly speaking, it falls into two classes, 
— essays and poems. The essays are generally composed of 
materials which he collected for purposes of lecturing. His 
astonishing lack of method is familiar ; he would con- 
stantly make note of any idea which occurred to him ; and 
when he wished to give a lecture, he would huddle together as 
many of these notes as should fill the assigned time, trusting 
with all the calm assurance of his unfaltering individualism 
that the truth inherent in the separate memoranda would give 
them all together the unity implied in the fact of their com- 
mon sincerity. But though this bewildering lack of system 
for a moment disguise the true character of his essays, the 
fact that these essays were so often delivered as lectures 
should remind us of what they really are. The Yankee 
lecturers, of whom Emerson was the most eminent, were only 
half-secularised preachers, — men who stood up and talked to 
ancestrally attentive audiences. And these eager hearers were 
disposed at once to respect the authority of their teachers, to 
be on the look-out for error, and to go home with a sense of 
edification. Emerson's essays, in short, prove to be an obvi- 
ous development from the endless sermons with which for gen- 
erations his ancestors had regaled the New England fathers. 
In much the same way, Emerson's poems, for all their erratic 
oddity of form, prove on consideration to possess many quali- 
ties of temper for which an orthodox mind would have sought 
expression in hymns. They are designed not so much to set 
forth human emotion or to give aesthetic delight as to stimulate 



3i8. THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

moral or spiritual ardour. For all his individualism, Emerson 
could not help being a good old inbred Yankee preacher. 

The orthodox clergy of New England, however, came, as 
truly as Paul himself, to preach Christ crucified. To say that 
preaching so various as Emerson's excludes anything, would 
be presumptuous. But certainly the impression produced by 
more than one examination of Emerson's writings goes far to 
warrant the assertion that the one thing which he' ignored was 
the crucifixion. Christ as a philosopher he respected and 
reverenced ; but Christ the Redeemer, who takes upon Him- 
self the sins of the world, interested him no more than the 
Lord's Supper. So far as Christ was a prophet, a speaker of 
beautiful and noble truth, a living example of stainless life, 
Emerson could reverently bow before him ; but when it 
came to considering Christ as more divine than other good 
men, this same Emerson found the act as far from reasonable 
as asserting one day's sunshine superior to that of another. 
The Christian Scriptures he thought on the whole nobler than 
even the Greek, and still more so than those more remote ones 
with which he overloaded some later numbers of the " Dial." 
All alike, however, great and small, interested him merely as 
guides, neither more nor less authoritative than such other 
guides as experience or the inner light. Each and all he 
valued only so far as they might help mankind toward percep- 
tion of the truth which he felt it his business to preach. His 
business, he felt it, rather than his duty. That fact of "in- 
terest," for lack of which he discarded the most sacred of all 
Christian traditions, really went to the depths of his nature. 
What interested him he was prepared to set forth so long as 
the interest lasted ; what did not interest him he was equally 
prepared serenely to neglect, no matter what anybody else 
thought about it. He had, however, the native grace never 
to relax his interest in what he conceived to be the deepest of 
all truths ; namely, that beyond human ken there lie unfathom- 
able, unseen, inexhaustible depths of reality. Into these depths 



EMERSON 319 

he was constantly seeking to pry as deeply as his human lim- 
itations would allow ; and what he saw there he was constantly 
and eagerly interested to reveal. A Yankee preacher of un- 
fettered idealism, one may call him ; better still, its seer, its 
prophet. 

Idealism, of course, is ancestrally familiar to any race of 
Puritan origin. That life is a fleeting; manifestation of un- 
fathomable realities which lie beyond it, that all we see and 
all we do and all we know are merely symbols of things un- 
seen, unactable, unknowable, had been preached to New 
England from the beginning. But Emerson's idealism soared 
far above that of the Christian fathers. Their effort was 
constantly to reduce unseen eternities to a system as rigid as 
that which addressed their human senses; and this effort 
has so far succeeded that to-day those who call God by His 
name thereby almost clothe Him in flesh and blood, in Jove- 
like beard and flowing robes, turning Him once more, even 
though immortally, into a fresh symbol of the infinite divine 
self which essentially transcends all limitation. To Emerson, 
on the other hand, the name of God, like the life of Christ, 
grouped itself with the little facts of every-day existence as 
simply one more phenomenal symbol of unspeakable, un- 
fathomable, transcendental truth. There is for ever some- 
thing beyond ; you may call it God, you may call it Nature, 
you may call it O ver-Soul ; each name becomes a fresh limi- 
tation, a mere symbolic bit of this human language of ours. 
The essential thing is not what you call the everlasting eter- 
nities ; it is that you shall never cease, simply and reverently, 
with constantly living interest, to recognise and to adore 
them. 

Now, in contrast with this infinite eternity of divine truth, 
no man, not even Christ himself, is free from the almost 
equally infinite limitations of earthly life. The essence of 
truth is that it comprehends and comprises all things, phe- 
nomena and ideals alike ; and we men, great or small, our- 



320 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

selves on any eternal scale little more wonderful than are the 
leaves of grass which spring and wither in the field, can per- 
ceive at any moment only one aspect of this truth. Look at 
the moon ; when it is full you shall see it as a silvery disk in 
the heavens ; again it is shrunk to a sickle; and yet again you 
shall see no moon at all. By and by you learn a little of the 
secret law which reveals the same satellite first in one of its 
protean forms and then in another throughout the changing 
months of our fleeting human years. Gaze next into the 
infinities, whereof the system is so unspeakably further from 
simplicity than the motions of any moon or planets. At one 
moment you shall see them in one aspect, at the next in an- 
other, and so on till life and eternity shall merge. Nay, you 
shall have less true knowledge of them than if for a little 
while one should revisit the glimpses of the moon, and, seeing 
only a curved line dimly gleaming in sunset skies, should re- 
turn to the shades with news that there is no moon left but a 
sinking new one. 

Would you strive to reconcile one with another the glories 
of eternity ? strive, with your petty human powers, to prove 
them consistent things ? — 

" Why should you keep your head over your shoulder ? Why drag 
about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you 
have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should con- 
tradict yourself : what then ? . . . A foolish consistency is the hob- 
goblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and 
divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. 
He may as wall concern himself with the shadow on the wall. Speak 
what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to- 
morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything 
you have said to-day. . . . Pythagoras was misunderstood, and So- 
crates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and 
Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be 
great is to be misunderstood." 

In Emerson's calm impatience of philosophic system there 
is a fresh touch of that unhesitating assurance with which he 
brushed aside the most sacred of Christian institutions, when 



- EMERSON 321 

for a moment it threatened to limit him. " See," he seems 
to bid you, "and report what you see as truly as language will 
let you. Then concern yourself no more as to what men 
shall say of your seeing or of your saying." For even though 
what you perceive be a gleam of absolute truth, the moment 
you strive to focus its radiance in the little terms of human 
language, you must limit the diffusive energy which makes it 
radiant. So even though your gleams be in themselves con- 
sistent one with another, your poor little vehicle of words, 
conventional and faint symbols with which mankind has 
learned to blunder, must perforce dim each gleam by a limi- 
tation itself irreconcilable with truth. Language at best was 
made to phrase what the cant of our passingly fashionable 
philosophy has called the knowable, and what interested 
Emerson surged infinitely throughout the unknowable realms. 
Take that famous passage from his essay in " Society and 
Solitude," on " Civilisation " : — 

" ' It was a great instruction,' said a saint in CromweU's war, ' that 
the best courages are but beams of the Almighty.' Hitch your 
wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot 
and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We 
shall find all their teams going the other wa}^ — Charles's Wain, 
Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules ; every god will leave us. Work 
rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote, — 
justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility." 

In one sense this seems hodge-podge; in another, for all 
its lack of lyric melody, it seems an almost lyric utterance 
of something which all men may know and which no man 
may define. " Hitch your waggon to a star" has flashed into 
the idiom of our speech ; but if you try to translate it into 
visual terms you must find it a mad metaphor. The waggon is 
no real rattling vehicle of the Yankee country, squalid in its 
dingy blue ; nor is the star any such as ever twinkled through 
the clear New England nights. No chain ever forged could 
reach far on the way from a Concord barn to Orion. Yet 



322 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

behind the homely, incomplete symbol there is a thought, 
an emotion, flashing swifter than ever ray of starry light, and 
so binding together the smallest things and the greatest which 
lie within our human ken that for an instant we may feel 
them both alike in magnitude, each alike mere symbols of 
illimitable truth beyond, and both together significant only 
because for an instant we have snatched them together, al- 
most at random, from immeasurable eternity. 

For phenomena, after all, are only symbols of the eternities, 
and words at their best are trivial, fleeting, conventional 
symbols of little nobler than these mere phenomena them- 
selves : — 

" Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The 
length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the 
speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in 
any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, 
no words would be suffered." 

So in a way of his own Emerson disdained words. This 
peculiarity appears perhaps most clearly when he is avowedly 
dealing with matters of fact. In 1856 he published a book 
named " English Traits," in which he recorded the impres- 
sions made on him by two visits to England, some fifteen 
years apart. His subject here is what he had observed as a 
traveller ; his treatment of it falls into unsystematic notes, 
each phrased in terms of unqualified assertion. As you read, 
you find few statements which do not seem full of shrewd, 
suggestive truth: — 

" Man in England," he says, for example, " submits to be a prod- 
uct of political economy. On a bleak moor a mill is built, a banking 
house is opened, and men come in as water in a sluiceway, and towns 
and cities rise. Man is made as a Birmingham button. The doub- 
ling of the population dates from Watt's steam-engine. A landlord 
who owns a province, says, ' The tenantry are unprofitable; let me 
have sheep.' He unroofs the houses and ships the population to 
America." 



EMERSON 323 

Again, a little later we read : — 

" There is an English hero superior to the French, the German, the 
Itahan, or the Greelc. When he is brought to the strife with fate, he 
sacrifices a richer material possession and on more purely metaphysi- 
cal grounds. He is there with his own consent, face to face with 
fortune, which he defies. On deliberate choice and from grounds of 
character, he has elected his part to live and die for, and dies with 



grandeur." 



Each of these statements seems true, and they are not really 
incompatible ; but each needs the other to qualify the im- 
pression of universality which Emerson somehow conveys with 
every sentence. Qualification he rarely stoops to. All he 
says is true, all incomplete, all suggestive, all traceable to the 
actual facts of that complex England which gave rise to all. 
And just as Emerson writes about England, with its wealth and 
its manufactures, its aristocracy and its cockneys, its " Times " 
and its trade and its Stonehenge, so he writes elsewhere of 
God, of the eternities, of Concord farmers, of the Over-Soul, 
of whatever else passes before his untiring earthly vision. 

A dangerous feat, this. Any one may attempt it, but most 
of us would surely fail, uttering mere jargon wherein others 
could discern little beyond our several limitations. As we con- 
template Emerson, then, our own several infirmities slowly 
reveal to us more and more clearly how true a seer he was. 
With more strenuous vision than is granted to common men, he 
really perceived in the eternities those living facts and lasting 
thoughts which, with all the careless serenity of his intellectual 
insolence, he rarely troubled himself intelligibly to phrase. 

Sometimes these perceptions fairly fell within the range of 
language ; and of language at such moments Emerson had won- 
derful mastery. Open his essays at random. On one page 
you shall find phrases like this : — 



" By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns until 
shall dissolve all things into the 
light, we see and know each other." 



it shall dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an ocean of 



324 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

On another, which deals with Friendship, comes this frag- 
ment of an imaginary letter : — 

" I am not very wise ; my moods are quite attainable, and I respect 
thy genius; it is to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not presume in 
tliee a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious 
torment." 

And there are hundreds of such felicitous passages. Often, 
however, as in that little verse which preludes the essay on 
" Spiritual Laws," Emerson was face to face with perceptions 
for which language was never framed ; and then comes his 
half-inspired jargon. Yet, through it all, you grow more 
and more to feel that with true creative energy he was 
always striving to make verbal images of what to him were 
true perceptions ; and more deeply still you grow aware that 
in his eager contemplation of truth he suffered astonishingly 
little of himself to intervene between perception and expres- 
sion. So long as what he said seemed for the moment true, 
he cared for little else. 

Again, one grows to feel more and more in Emerson a trait 
surprising in any man so saturated with ideal philosophy. As 
the story of Brook Farm indicated, the Transcendental move- 
ment generally expressed itself in ways which, whatever their 
purity, beauty, or sincerity, had not the grace of common 
sense. In the slang of our day, the Transcendentalists 
were cranks. With Emerson the case was different ; in the 
daily conduct of his private life, as well as in the articulate 
utterances which pervade even his most eccentric writings, 
you will always find him, despite the vagaries of his ideal 
philosophy, a shrewd, sensible Yankee, full of a quiet, re- 
pressed, but ever present sense of humour which prevented him 
from overestimating himself, and compelled him when dealing 
with phenomena to recognise their relative practical value. 
He was aware of the Over-Soul, in whose presence Orion is no 
better than a team which should plod before a Concord hay- 
cart. He was equally aware that a dollar is a dollar, and a cent 



EMERSON 32 s 

a cent, and that dollars and cents are convenient things to 
have in pocket. When you think of him as a lecturer or as 
a writer of books, then, you find all the old contradiction in a 
new form. You go to him as a prophet ; you find a kindly 
gentleman with a good-natured smile lurking in the corners of 
his lips, who seems to tell you : " Dear me, I am no more of 
a prophet than you are. We are all prophets. If you like, 
I will look into the eternities with great pleasure, and tell you 
what I see there ; but at the end of the business I shall pre- 
sent you with a little bill. If you will pay it, I shall receipt 
it, and dine a trifle better in consequence." 

He was the prophet of Transcendentalism, if you like; but, 
after all, his general manner and temper were less prophetic 
than those of conventional parsons who thunder forth divine 
authority. He was farther still from the authoritative prophets 
of antiquity. He did not passionately seek God and phrase 
his discoveries in the sacred mysteries of dogma. He was 
rather a canny, honest Yankee gentleman, who mingled with 
his countrymen, and taught them as well as he could ; who 
felt a kindly humour when other people agreed with him, and 
troubled himself little when they disagreed ; who hitched his 
waggon to star after star, but never really confused the stars 
with the waggon. 

And so descending to Concord earth, we find in him a trait 
very characteristic of the period when he happened to live, 
and one at which he himself would have been the first good- 
humouredly to smile. He was born just when the Renais- 
sance of New England was at hand, when at last the old 
tripod of theology, classics, and law was seen not to be the 
only basis of the human intellect, when all philosophy and 
letters were finally opening to New England knowledge. 
With all his contemporaries he revelled in this new world of 
human record and expression. To the very end he never 
lost his consequent, exuberantly boyish trick of dragging in 
allusions to all sorts of personages and matters which he 



326 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

knew only by name. Take that sentence at which we 
glanced from his essay on Self-Reliance : " Pythagoras was 
misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and 
Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton." These great names 
he mentions with all the easy assurance of intimacy ; he 
could hardly speak more familiarly of seven Concord far- 
mers idling in a row on some sunny bench. Turn to him 
anywhere, and in any dozen pages you will find allusions as 
complacent as these, and about as accidental, to the bewil- 
deringly various names at which his encyclopedia chanced to 
open. He had, in short, all the juvenile pedantry of renas- 
cent New England at a moment when Yankees had begun to 
know the whole range of literature by name, and when they 
did not yet distinguish between such knowledge and the un- 
pretentious mastery of scholarship. 

It is now nearly twenty years since Emerson's life gently 
faded away, and it is a full sixty since his eager preaching or 
prophecy of individualistic idealism stirred renascent New 
England to its depths. We have been trying to guess what 
Emerson may mean in permanent literature. To understand 
what he means historically, we must remind ourselves again 
of the conditions which surrounded his maturity. When he 
came to the pulpit of the Second Church of Boston, the tyranny 
of custom, at least in theoretical matters, was little crushed. 
Heretical though Unitarianism was, it remained in outward 
form a dominant religion. Statesmanship and scholarship, 
too, were equally fixed and rigid ; and so, to a degree hardly 
conceivable to-day, was the structure of society. Even to- 
day untrammelled freedom of thought, unrestrained assertion 
of individual belief, sometimes demands grave self-sacrifice. 
In Emerson's day it demanded heroic spirit. 

To say that Emerson's lifelong heroism won us what moral 
and intellectual freedom we now possess would be to confuse 
the man with the movement of which he is the great exemplar. 
As the years pass, however, we begin to understand that no 



EMERSON 327 

other American writings record that movement half so vitally 
as his. As our individual freedom becomes more and more 
surely established, we may delight in Emerson more or less. 
According as our individuality responds or not to the ideal- 
ism which touched him, we may find him repellent or 
sympathetic ; and although it may hardly be asserted, it may 
fairly be surmised, that even in Emerson's most memorable 
utterances the future may find no considerable truth not better 
phrased by others. For in his effort to express truth, just as 
in his whole knowledge of life, he was limited by the national 
inexperience which throughout his time still protected New 
England. Yet whether or no, in generations to come, Emer- 
son shall prove to have made lasting contributions to human 
wisdom, one thing which will remain true of him should com- 
mend him to the regard of all his countrymen who love 
spiritual freedom. We may not care for the things he said, 
we may not find sympathetic the temper in which he uttered 
them, but we cannot deny that when, for two hundred years, 
intellectual tyranny had kept the native American mind cramped 
within the limits of tradition, Emerson fearlessly stood forth 
as the chief representative of that movement which asserted 
the right of every individual to think, to feel, to speak, to act 
for himself, confident that so far as each acts in sincerity 
good shall ensue. 

Whoever believes in individualism, then, must always re- 
spect in Emerson a living prophet ; and, just as surely, those 
who find prospect of salvation only in obedience to authority 
must lament the defection from their ranks of a spirit which, 
whatever its errors, even they must admit to have been brave, 
honest, serene, and essentially pure with all that purity which is 
the deepest grace of ancestral New England. 



VII 

THE LESSER MEN OF CONCORD 

Concord, Massachusetts, until Emerson's time celebrated as 
the place where the embattled farmers made their stand against 
the British regulars in 1775, is now even better known as the 
Yankee village where for half a century Emerson lived, and 
gathered about him a little group of the intellectually and 
spiritually enlightened. Until very lately, indeed, something 
of this atmosphere lingered in Concord air. Among the 
humours of New England for some fifteen years has been a 
Concord School of Philosophy, where of a summer fantastic 
people have collected to hear and to give lectures. And 
everybody has been happy, and no human being is known to 
have been harmed. When the Concord School of Philosophy 
began its blameless existence, however, what makes Concord 
memorable, was no longer there : Emerson had passed away. 
Whatever Concord retained, it had lost that saving grace of 
sound good sense which is among Emerson's most certain 
claims to distinction. *• 

This trait of his appears most clearly when we compare 
him with one or two of his fellow-townsmen. Of the men 
who flourished in Emerson's Concord, to be sure, the most 
eminent was Hawthorne, whose work belongs not to philoso- 
phy, but to pure letters, and whom we shall consider later. 
He would hardly have expected a place among the prophets of 
the eternities. At least two other men would have been dis- 
posed to call themselves philosophers, and, with artless lack of 
humour, to expect Immortality in company with Emerson and 
Plato, and the rest. These were Amos Bronson Alcott and 
Henry David Thoreau. 



ALCOTT 329 

Alcott was the elder, and older even than Emerson. Born 
in 1799, the son of an every-day Connecticut farmer, he began 
life as a peddler, in which character he sometimes strayed a 
good way southward. A thoroughly honest man of unusually 
active mind, his chief emotional trait appears to have been a 
self-esteem which he never found reason to abate. In the 
midst of peddling, then, he felt himself divinely commissioned 
to reform mankind. He soon decided that his reform ought 
to begin with education. As early as 1823, having succeeded 
in educating himself in a manner which he found satisfactory, 
he opened a school at his native town, Wolcott, Connecticut. 
Five years later he removed to Boston, where he announced 
that if people would send him their children, he would educate 
them as children had never been educated before. 

At that time, in 1828, the spirit of reform was so fresh in 
the air of New England as to affect many heads which ought 
to have been too strong for just that intoxication. Among 
Mr. Alcott's pupils at different times were children and grand- 
children of eminently conservative Bostonians. Dissatisfied 
with the mechanical lifelessness of the regular schools, they 
eagerly accepted Mr. Alcott's novel theories. His method of 
teaching, as reported by himself in a volume or two of conver- 
sations with his pupils, appears to have been Socratic. In the 
midst of his disciples, Mr. Alcott posed as a purified and 
beautified Greek philosopher, whose interlocutors were Boston 
children, ranging between the ages of three and ten. He 
would ask them questions about the soul and the eternities, 
and occasionally about matters of scientific and other fact. 
He would try to set their infant minds constructively work- 
ing; and incidentally he would always be on the watch for any 
accents of perfected praise which might by chance issue from 
the mouths of these Yankee babes and sucklings. Apart from 
abstract wisdom, indeed, and its incidental humour, the most 
obvious trait which distinguishes Mr. Alcott from Plato's 
Socrates was his honest disposition to learn, if so might be, 



330 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

from the lips which he was persuading to babble. Very non- 
sensical, no doubt, this must seem nowadays ; but there is an 
aspect in which it is touchingly characteristic of our renascent 
New England, which hoped that freedom from shackling tra- 
dition might open an illimitably excellent future. 

Mr. Alcott's pristine innocence of good sense appeared most 
pleasantly in his notions of discipline. He had remarked that 
when people misbehave, the suffering which ensues is apt to 
fall on others than the sinners. If I hit you, for example, it is 
you who get a black eye. Now, if human nature is naturally 
good, men must instinctively shrink from consciously injuring 
others ; the strongest deterrent force from misconduct, it fol- 
lows, must arise from the normal philanthropy of human beings. 
In order to impress this wisdom on children four or five years 
old, Mr. Alcott hit on an ingenious device. Some children, he 
noticed, were disposed to be worse than others. When these 
bad ones were naughty, he reasoned, they should be made to 
feel that others suffered, and that the better the others were, 
the greater were their sufferings. Accordingly, when a bad 
child made a noise, he would regularly shake a good one in 
the offender's presence. It is said, furthermore, that he did 
not shrink from extreme conclusions. Discerning in his rela- 
tion to his pupils an analogy to that which exists between a 
benevolent Creator and mankind, and holding that when man 
misbehaves, God is troubled, he is believed on occasions of 
unusual gravity unflinchingly to have inflicted corporal pun- 
ishment on himself, in the presence of his assembled pupils. 

Extreme as this example of Transcendental doctrine applied 
to life may seem, it is very characteristic of Bronson Alcott, who 
all his life maintained the gospel of Transcendental individual- 
ism. Before many years his school came to an end. Mr. 
Alcott developed into a professional philosopher, lecturing, 
writing, and failing to support his family in decent comfort. 
When the " Dial " was started, he contributed to it his " Or- 
phic Sayings." The fountain of these was inexhaustible; and 



ALCOTT 331 

even Margaret Fuller had practical sense enough to inform 
him with regret that she could not afford to fill the " Dial " with 
matter, however valuable, from a single contributor. His 
reply was characteristic ; he loftily regretted that the " Dial " 
was no longer an organ of free speech. In 1842 he visited 
England, where certain people of a radical turn received him 
with a seriousness which he found gratifying. Returning to 
America, he endeavoured to establish at Harvard, Massachu- 
setts, a community called Fruitlands, something like the con- 
temporary Brook Farm, but free from the errors which he 
detected in the more famous community, founded under other 
auspices than his own. Before long Fruitlands naturally col- 
lapsed. For most of his ensuing life, which lasted until 1888, 
he lived in Concord, supporting himself, so far as he at all 
contributed to his support, by writing and lecturing in a man- 
ner which satisfied his self-esteem and very slightly appealed to 
the public. Toward the end of his life he was the chief 
founder of the Concord School of Philosophy, and he had a 
senile relapse into something like orthodox Christianity. 

There is an aspect, no doubt, in which such a life seems 
the acme of perverse selfishness ; but this is far from the 
whole story. The man's weakness, as well as his strength, 
lay in a self-esteem so inordinate that it crowded out of his 
possibilities any approach either to good sense or to the saving 
grace of humour. On the other hand, he was honest, he was 
sincere, he was devoted to idealism, and he attached to his 
perceptions, opinions, and utterances an importance which those 
who found him sympathetic were occasionally inclined to share. 
When his religious views were affected by that touch of senile 
orthodoxy, sundry good people seemed disposed to think that 
there might be unusual rejoicing in Heaven. Most likely he 
thought so himself. His diary, which consisted largely of phi- 
losophical speculations, he labelled " Scriptures " for each year. 
He seems to have held these utterances in as high respect as ever 
churchman felt for Scripture of old. He saw no reason why 



332 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

his inspiration should not be as sacred as Isaiah's or Jeremiah's 
or Paul's. Of his published writings none was remembered, 
unless by his immediate friends, a year after he died. In life 
the man was a friend of Emerson's, holding in the town of 
Concord a position which he probably believed as eminent as 
Emerson's own. In death he is the extreme type of what 
Yankee idealism could come to when unhampered by humour 
or common-sense. 

If Alcott is rapidly being forgotten, the case is different with 
Thoreau. For whatever the quality of Thoreau's philosophy, 
the man was in his own way a literary artist of unusual merit. 
He was born in 1817, of a Connecticut family, not long 
emigrated from France. On his mother's side he had Yankee 
blood, but not of the socially distinguished kind. What little 
record remains of his kin would seem to show that, like 
many New England folks of the farming class, they had a 
kind of doggedly self-assertive temper which inclined them 
to habits of personal isolation. Thoreau graduated at Har- 
vard College in 1837. While a student he gained some little 
distinction as a writer of English ; his themes, as undergrad- 
uate compositions are still called at Harvard, though common- 
place in substance, are sensitively good in technical form. After 
graduation, he lived mostly at Concord. Though not of pure 
Yankee descent, he had true Yankee versatility ; he was a 
tolerable farmer, a good surveyor, and a skilful maker of 
lead-pencils. In one way or another, then, he was able by 
the work of comparatively few weeks in the year to provide 
the simple necessities of his veg^arian life. So he early 
determined to work no more than was needful for self-support, 
and to spend the rest of his time in high thinking. 

In the general course which his thinking and conduct took, 
one feels a trace of his French origin. Human beings, the 
French philosophy of the eighteenth century had strenuously 
held, are born good ; evil, then, must obviously spring from the 
distorting influences of society. Accepted by the earlier Trans- 



THOREAU 333 

cendentalists, this line of thought had led to such experimental 
communities as Brook Farm and the still more fleeting Fruit- 
lands. Thoreau was Frenchman enough to reason out indi- 
vidualism to its logical extreme. The reform of society 
must be accomplished, if at all, by the reform of the individ- 
uals who compose it. Communities, after all, are only micro- 
cosmic societies, wherein must lurk all the germs of social 
evil. Let individuals look to themselves, then ; under no 
other circumstances can human nature unobstructedly develop 
its inherent excellence. So for twenty-five years Thoreau, liv- 
ing at Concord, steadily tried to keep himself free from com- 
plications with other people. Incidentally he had the good 
sense not to marry ; and as nobody was dependent on him 
for support, his method of life could do no harm. 

His best-known experiment was his residence for about 
two years in the woods near Concord, where he built himself 
a little cabin, supported himself by cultivating land enough to 
provide for his immediate wants, and devoted his considerable 
leisure to philosophic thought. The fruit of this experiment 
was his well-known book, "Walden;" published in 1854, it 
remains a vital bit of literature for any one who loves to read 
about Nature. 

Of course Thoreau was eccentric, but his eccentricity was 
not misanthropic. Inclined by temperament and philosophy 
alike to this life of protestant solitude, he seems to have re- 
garded his course as an experimental example. He was not 
disposed to quarrel with people who disagreed with him. All 
he asked was to be let alone. If his life turned out well, 
others would ultimately imitate him; if it turned out ill, no- 
body else would be the worse. Though his philosophising 
often seems unpractically individual, then, it never exhales 
such unwholesomeness as underlay Alcott's self-esteem. What 
is more, there can be no question that his speculations have 
appealed to some very sensible minds. All the same, if he 
had confined himself to ruminating on the eternities and 



334 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

human nature, with which his sympathy was at best Hmited, 
his position in literary history would hardly be important. 
What gave him lasting power was his unusually sympathetic 
observation of Nature. A natural vein of indolence, to be 
sure, prevented him from observing either precociously oi 
systematically ; but when, as was more and more the case, 
he found himself alone with woods and fields and waters, he 
had true delight in the little sights which met his eyes, in the 
little sounds which came to his ears, in all the constant, in- 
conspicuous beauties which the prosaic toilsomeness of Yankee 
life had hitherto failed to perceive. 

Nature, as every one knows, had been a favourite theme of 
that romantic revival in England whose leader was Words- 
worth. In one aspect, then, Thoreau's writing often seems 
little more than an American evidence of a temper which had 
declared itself in the old world a generation before. Noth- 
ing, however, can alter the fact that the Nature he delighted 
in was characteristically American. First of all men, Thoreau 
brought that revolutionary temper which recoils from the arti- 
ficialities of civilisation face to face with the rugged fields, 
the pine woods and the apple orchards, the lonely ponds and 
the crystalline skies of eastern New England. His travels oc- 
casionally ranged so far as the Merrimac River, Cape Cod, or 
even beyond Maine into Canada ; but pleasant as the books are 
in which he recorded these wanderings, as exceptional as were 
Cotton Mather's infrequent excursions through the bear- 
haunted wilds to Andover, we could spare them far better 
than " Walden," or than the journals in which for years he 
set down his daily observations in the single town of Concord. 
Thoreau's individuality is often so assertive as to repel a 
sympathy which it happens not instantly to attract; but that 
sympathy must be unwholesomely sluggish which would 
willingly resist the appeal of his communion with Nature. 
If your lot be ever cast in some remote region of our simple 
country, he can do you, when you will, a rare service, stimu- 



THOREAU 335 

lating your eye to see, and your ear to hear, in all the little 
commonplaces about you, those endlessly changing details 
which make life everywhere so unfathomably, immeasurably 
wondrous. For Nature is truly a miracle ; and he who will 
regard her lovingly shall never lack that inspiration which 
miracles breathe into the spirit of mankind. 

Nor is Thoreau's vitality in literature a matter only of his 
observation. Open his works almost anywhere, — there are 
ten volumes of them now, — and even in the philosophic pas- 
sages you will find loving precision of touch. He was no 
immortal maker of phrases. Amid bewildering obscurities, 
Emerson now and again flashed out utterances which may last 
as long as our language. Thoreau had no such power; but 
he did possess in higher degree than Emerson himself the 
power of making sentences and paragraphs artistically beauti- 
ful. Read him aloud, and you will find in his work a trait 
like that which we remarked in the cadences of Brockden 
Brown and of Poe ; the emphasis of your voice is bound to 
fall where meaning demands. An effect like this is attainable 
only through delicate sensitiveness to rhythm. So when you 
come to Thoreau's pictures of Nature you have an almost 
inexhaustible series of verbal sketches in which every touch 
has the grace of precision. On a large scale, to be sure, his 
composition falls to pieces ; he never troubled himself about a 
systematically made book, or even a systematic chapter. In 
mere choice of words, too, he is generally so simple as to 
seem almost commonplace. But his sentences and paragraphs 
are often models of art so fine as to seem artless. Take, 
for example, this well-known passage from " Walden " : — 

" Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just 
putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a bright- 
ness like sunshine to the landscape, especially in cloudy days, as if 
the sun were breaking through mists and shining faintly on the hill- 
sides here and there. On the third or fourth of May I saw a loon in 
the pond, and during the first week of the month I heard the whip* 
poorwill, the brown thrasher, the veery, the wood-pewee, the chewink, 



336 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

and other birds. I had heard the wood-thrush long before. The 
phebe had already come once more and looked in at my door and 
window, to see if my house were cavern-like enough for her, sustain- 
ino- herself on humming wings with cHnched talons, as if she held by 
the air, while she surveyed the premises. The sulphur-like pollen of 
the pitch-pine soon covered the pond and the stones and the rotten 
wood along the shore, so that you could have collected a barrelful. 
This is the ' sulphur showers ' we hear of. Even in Calidas' drama 
of Sacontala, we read of ' rills dyed yellow with the golden dust of the 
lotus.' And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one 
rambles into higher and higher grass." 

The more you read work like that, the more admirable you 
will find its artistic form. 

With Thoreau's philosophising the case is different. 
Among Emerson's chief traits was the fact that when he 
scrutinised the eternities in search of ideal truth, his whole 
energy was devoted to the act of scrutiny. Vague, then, 
and bewildering as his phrases may often seem, we are sen- 
sible of a feeling that this Emerson is actually contemplating 
the immensities ; and these are so unspeakably vaster than 
all mankind — not to speak of the single human being who 
for the moment is striving to point our eyes toward them — - 
that our thoughts again and again concern themselves rather 
with the truths thus dimly seen than with anything concern- 
ing the seer. The glass through which Emerson con- 
templated the mysteries is achromatic. Now, Thoreau's 
philosophic speculations so surely appeal to powerful minds 
who find them sympathetic that we may well admit them to 
involve more than they instantly reveal to minds not disposed 
to sympathise. Even their admirers, however, must admit 
them to be coloured throughout by the unflagging self-con- 
sciousness involved in Thoreau's eccentric, harmless life. 
Perhaps, like Emerson, Thoreau had the true gift of vision ; 
but surely he could never report his visions in terms which 
may suffer us to forget himself. The glass which he offers to 
our eyes is always tinctured with his own disturbing individu- 
ality. In spite, then, of the fact that Thoreau was a more 



THOREAU 337 

conscientious artist than Emerson, this constant obtrusion of 
his personality ranges him in a lower rank, just as surely as 
his loving sense of nature ranges him far above the half-foolish 
egotism of Bronson Alcott. More and more the emergence 
of Emerson from his surroundings grows distinct. Like truly 
great men, whether he was truly great or not, he possessed 
the gift of such common-sense as saves men from the per- 
versities of eccentricity. 

We come now to a fact on which we must lightly touch. 
When we glanced at the first number of the " Dial " we re- 
marked that the only advertisement on its cover was that of 
Mr. Jacob Abbott's " RoUo Books," which remain, with 
their unconscious humour and art, such admirable pictures 
of Yankee life about 1840. Twenty -eight years later, Louisa. 
Alcott, the admirably devoted daughter of that minor prophet 
of Transcendentalism, published a book for girls, called 
" Little Women," which gives almost as artless a picture of 
Yankee life in the generation which followed Rollo's. A com- 
parison between these two works is interesting. Comically 
limited and consciously self-content as the world of Rollo is, 
it has a refinement which amounts almost to distinction. 
Whatever you think of the Holiday family and their friends, 
who may be taken as types of the Yankee middle class just 
after Gilbert Stuart painted the prosperous gentlemen of 
Boston, they are not vulgar. The world of " Little Women " 
is a far more sophisticated world than that of Rollo, a bigger 
one, a rather braver one, and just as sweet and clean. But 
instead of unquestioning self-respect, its personages display 
that rude self-assertion which has generally tainted the lower 
middle class of English-speaking countries. 

This contrast suggests a contrast between the personal 
careers of Alcott and of Thoreau and those of the New 
England men of letters whom we have hitherto mentioned. 
Whatever their superficial manners, Alcott and Thoreau alike 
remained in temper what they were born, — farmers' sons, 

22 



338 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

men of the people. Emerson and Channing, on the other 
hand, and the historians and the scholars and the public men 
of New England, belonged either by birth or by early acquired 
habit to the traditional aristocracy of their native region. A 
similar contrast we remarked in New York, where Irving 
and Cooper and Bryant were succeeded by Poe and the 
Knickerbocker School. As the nineteenth century proceeded, 
literature in America tended to fall into the hands of people 
not less worthy, but perceptibly less distinguished than those 
who had first illustrated it. 

We have now followed the Renaissance of New England 
from its beginning in the fresh vitality of public utterances 
and scholarship, through the awakening optimism of the Uni- 
tarians, to the disintegrant vagaries of the Transcendentalists. 
We have seen how, as this impulse proceeded to affect the 
less distinguished social classes, it tended to assume forms 
which might reasonably alarm people of sagely conservative 
habit. Reform in some respects is essentially destructive •, 
and the enthusiasm of Yankee reformers early showed symp- 
toms of concentration in a shape which ultimately became 
very destructive indeed. This, to which we must now turn, 
and which enlisted at least the sympathies of almost every 
Transcendentalist, — which was warmly advocated by Chan- 
ning himself, which stirred Emerson to fervid utterances con- 
cerning actual facts, and which inspired some of the latest 
and most ardent writings of Thoreau, — was the philanthropic 
movement for the abolition of negro slavery, an institution 
which still persisted throughout our Southern States. 



VIII 



THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT 

Enthusiasm for reform was obviously involved in the concep- 
tion of human nature which underlay the world-wide revolu- 
tionary movement whose New England manifestation took 
the forms of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. If human 
nature is essentially good, if evil is merely the consequence of 
what modern evolutionists might call artificial environment, it 
follows that relaxation of environment, releasing men from 
temporary bondage, must change things for the better. The 
heyday of Transcendentalism, then, had a humourous super- 
ficial aspect, which was admirably described in the opening 
passage of Lowell's essay on Thoreau, published in 1865 : — 

" What contemporary, if he was in the fighting period of his life, 
(since Nature sets limits about her conscription for spiritual fields, as 
the State does in physical warfare,) will ever forget what was some- 
what vaguely called the ' Transcendental Movement ' of thirty years 
ago? Apparently set astir by Carlyle's essays on the 'Signs of the 
Times,' and on ' History,' the final and more immediate impulse seemed 
to be given by 'Sartor Resartus.' At least a republication in Boston 
of that wonderful Abraham a Sancta Clara sermon on Falstaff s text 
of the miserable forked radish gave the signal for a sudden mental and 
moral mutiny. Ecce nunc te/npus acceptabile ! was shouted on all hands 
with every variety of emphasis, and by voices of every conceivable 
pitch, representing the three sexes of men, women and Lady Mary 
Wortley Montagues. The nameless eagle of the tree Ygdrasil was 
about to sit at last, and wild-eyed enthusiasts rushed from all sides, 
each eager to thrust under the mystic bird that chalk egg from which 
the new and fairer Creation was to be hatched in due time. Redeunt 
Saturnia regna, — so much was certain, though in what shape, or 
by what methods, was still a matter of debate. Every possible form 
of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. Bran 
had its prophets, and the presartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, 



340 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

tailored impromptu from the tar-pot by incensed neighbours, and sent 
forth to illustrate the 'feathered Mercury,' as defined by Webster 
and Worcester. Plainness of speech was carried to a pitch that would 
have taken away the breath of George Fox ; and even swearing had its 
evangelists, who answered a simple inquiry after their health with an 
elaborate ingenuity of imprecation that might have been honourably 
mentioned by Marlborough in general orders. Everybody had a 
mission (with a capital M) to attend to everybody else's business. No 
brain but had its private maggot, which must have found pitiably short 
commons sometimes. Not a few impecunious zealots abjured the use 
of money (unless earned by other people), professing to live on the 
internal revenues of the spirit. Some had an assurance of instant mil- 
lennium so soon as hooks and eyes should be substituted for buttons. 
Communities were established where everything was to be common 
but common sense. Men renounced their old Gods, and hesitated only 
whether to bestow their furloughed allegiance on Thor or Budh. Con- 
ventions were held for every hitherto inconceivable purpose. The 
belated gift of tongues, as among the Fifth Monarchy men, spread like 
a contagion, rendering its victims incomprehensible to all Christian 
men ; whether equally so to the most distant possible heathen or not was 
unexperimented, though many would have subscribed liberally that a 
fair trial might be made. It was the pentecost of Shinar. The day of 
utterances reproduced the day of rebuses and anagrams, and there was 
nothing so simple that uncial letters and the style of Diphilus the 
Labyrinth could not turn it into a riddle. Many foreign revolutionists 
out of work added to the general misunderstanding their contribution 
of broken English in every most ingenious form of fracture. All stood 
ready at a moment's notice to reform everything but themselves. The 
general motto was : — 

' And we '11 talk with them, too, 
And take upon 's the mystery of things 
As if we were God's spies.'" 

So long as reform remains in this stage, it can hardly im- 
press people of common-sense as worse than ridiculous. 
When reform becomes militant, however, trouble heaves in 
sight ; and the militant shape which New England reform took 
in the '40's clearly involved not only a social revolution, but 
an unprecedented attack on that general right of property 
which the Common Law had always defended. 

Negro slavery, at one time common to all the English- 
■ speaking colonies, had died out In the Northern States. During 



THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT 341 

the first quarter of the nineteenth century, meanwhile, the 
condition of industry in the South had tended to stimulate the 
institution in that region until it assumed unforeseen social and 
economic importance. Throughout colonial history there had 
been considerable theoretical objection to it, a line of American 
thought which may be adequately traced by consulting the 
index of Stedman and Hutchinson's " Library of American 
Literature." Samuel Sewall opposed slavery ; so from the 
beginning did the Quakers ; and even in the South itself there 
were plenty of people who saw its evils and hoped for its dis- 
appearance ; but no thoroughly organised movement against 
it took place until the air of New England freshened with the 
spirit of its Renaissance. 

Channing, who passed the years from 1798 to 1800 in 
Richmond, wrote from thence a letter which strikingly ex- 
presses the feeling excited by slavery in earnest Unitarians : — 

" There is one object here which always depresses me. It is slavery. 
This alone would prevent me from ever settling in Virginia. Language 
cannot express my detestation of it. Master and slave ! Nature 
never made such a distinction, or established such a relation. Man, 
when forced to substitute the will of another for his own, ceases to be 
amoral agent; his title to the name of man is extinguished, he becomes 
a mere machine in the hands of his oppressor. No empire is so valu- 
able as the empire of one's self. No right is so inseparable from 
humanity, and so necessary to the improvement of our species, as the 
right of exerting the powers which nature has given us in the pursuit 
of any and of every good which we can obtain without doing injury to 
others. Should you desire it, I will give you some idea of the situa- 
tion and character of the negroes in Virginia. It is a subject so 
degrading to humanity that I cannot dwell on it with pleasure. I 
should be obliged to show you every vice, heightened by every mean- 
ness and added to every misery. The influence of slavery on the 
whites is almost as fatal as on the blacks themselves." 

To Channing, the conclusion here stated was unavoidable. 
If human beings are essentially good, they have a natural right 
to free development. No form of environment could more 
impede such development than lifelong slavery. When any 



342 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

honest Unitarian was brought face to face with slavery, then, 
he was confronted with a dilemma. Either this thing was a 
monstrous denial of fundamental truth, or else the negroes 
were not human. Something like the latter view was cer- 
tainly held by many good people. In the South, indeed, it 
became almost axiomatic. In Mark Twain's " Huckleberry 
Finn " there is an admirably compact expression of this tem- 
per. A boy, drawing the long bow, tells a simple-hearted 
and charitable woman that the boiler of a steamer has just 
exploded. 

" ' Good gracious ! ' she exclaims, ' anybody hurt ? ' 

" ' No, 'm. Killed a nigger.' 

" ' Well, it 's lucky ; because sometimes people do get hurt.' " 

With which sigh of relief the good creature goes on to relate 
some melancholy experiences of the boy's Uncle Silas. 

It is hardly extreme to say, however, that this opinion is 
more consonant with New England temper to-day than it was 
seventy years ago. Modern ethnology seems to recognise a 
pretty marked distinction between human beings in the Stone 
Age and human beings as developed into the civilisation of 
the nineteenth century ; and though native Africans are not 
literally neolithic, they certainly linger far behind the social 
stage which has been reached by modern Europe or America. 
To philanthropic people in 1830, on the other hand, the dis- 
tinction between Caucasians and Africans seemed literally a 
question of complexion. Men they believed to be incarnate 
souls ; and the colour which a soul happened to assume they 
held a mere accident. 

Accordingly, a full nine years before the foundation of the 
" Dial," there was unflinchingly established in Boston a news- 
paper, which until the close of the Civil War remained the 
official organ of the New England antislavery men. This was 
the " Liberator," founded in 1831 by William Lloyd Garri- 
son, then only twenty-six years old. Born of the poorer classes 



THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT 343 

at Newburyport in 1805, by trade a printer, by temperament 
an uncompromising reformer, he was stirred from youth by 
a deep conviction that slavery must be uprooted. When he 
founded the " Liberator," he had already made himself con- 
spicuous ; but the educated classes thought him insignificant. 
In 1833 he was a principal founder of the Antislavery Society 
in Philadelphia. From that time, the movement strength- 
ened. Garrison died in 1879. For the last fifteen years of 
his life he was held, as he is held by tradition, a great 
national hero, a man who stood for positive right, who won 
his cause, who deserves unquestioning admiration, and whose 
opponents merit equally unquestioning contempt. 

So complete a victory has rarely been the lot of any earthly 
reformer, and there are aspects in which Garrison deserves 
all the admiration accorded to his memory. Fanatical, 
of course, he was absolutely sincere in his fanaticism, abso- 
lutely devoted and absolutely brave. What is more, he is to 
be distinguished from most Americans who in his earlier days 
had attained eminence and influence by the fact that he never 
had the advantage or limit, as you will, of such educational 
training as should enable him to see more than one side of a 
question. The greatest strength of an honest, uneducated 
reformer lies in his unquestioning singleness of view. He 
really believes those who oppose him to be as wicked as he 
believes himself to be good. What moral strength is inherent 
in congenitally blind conviction is surely and honourably his. 

But because Garrison was honest, brave, and strenuous, 
and because long before his life closed, the movement to which 
he unreservedly gave his energy proved triumphant, it does 
not follow that the men who opposed him were wicked. To 
understand the temper of the conservative people of New 
England we must stop for a moment, and see how slavery 
presented itself to them during the years of the antislavery 
struggle. 

In the first place, the institution of slavery was honestly 



344 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

regarded by many people as one phase of the more compre- 
hensive institution which really lies at the basis of modern 
civilisation ; namely, property. Property in any form involves 
deprivation. Property in land, for example, deprives many 
human beings of access to many portions of the earth, and 
still more of liberty to cultivate it and to enjoy the fruits of 
their labours. Property in corporations involves the payment 
of interest to those who possess capital, and this payment cer- 
tainly impresses many worthy labouring men as wantonly sub- 
tracted from their earnings. So in our own day we have seen 
many honest attacks on property, not only in land, but in 
every form of corporations. Once for all, we may admit that 
there is some ground for these moral crusades. So far as prop- 
erty involves deprivation and incidentally results in grinding 
hardships, property involves evil. On the other hand, it always 
involves a great deal of good. Take, for example, not private 
persons whose incomes exceed their actual needs, but public 
institutions which are unquestioningly regarded as vitally im- 
portant to the general welfare, such as universities or libraries. 
To do their service to learning and wisdom, these need incomes. 
They must possess investments which shall return a certain 
annual percentage ; otherwise their work must stop. Very 
good : is the suffering and inequality involved in property, 
when property takes the form of land or shares, an evil so 
serious as to counterbalance the good done to civilisation by 
institutions of learning ? Some admirable people, holding 
property essentially wrong, declare that it is ; most men of 
hard sense, who may be taken as a type of the conservative 
classes, maintain the contrary. 

The conviction that slavery, whatever its evils, was really a 
form of property, and that an attack on slavery therefore in- 
volved a general attack on the whole basis of civilisation, was 
one of the strongest convictions of conservative New England. 
In many minds which abhorred the evils of slavery, furthermore, 
this conviction was strengthened by an equally honest one that 



THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT 345 

when you have made a bargain you should stick to it. The 
Constitution of the United States was presenting itself more 
and more in the light of an agreement between two incom- 
patible sets of economic institutions, assuring to each the right 
freely to exist within its own limits. The fact that as a man 
of business you have given a note to some one whose per- 
sonal morals you believe deplorable, is no reason why your note 
should not be paid. Among the conservative classes of New 
England, then, the antislavery movement seemed as threaten- 
ing to the Union as to property itself. Whatever threatened 
Union or property, they conceived, clearly threatened civilisa- 
tion, and on civilisation rests all that is best in human life or 
human society ; for civilisation is the mother of ideals. 

A third consideration, also, had great weight among thought- 
ful people. During the French Revolution the negroes of the 
French colonies in the West Indies had effected the triumph- 
ant insurrection which resulted in the still existing republics of 
San Domingo and Hayti ; and in 1830 there were gentlemen 
in New England who personally remembered the horrors of 
that tragic time. The blacks had risen in overwhelming 
numbers ; white males they had slaughtered ; their wives and 
daughters, often women educated under the gentlest influences 
of France during the Old Regime, they had done to death 
more cruelly still. To cite a single instance, recorded by a 
Boston gentleman who escaped from San Domingo with his 
life : " The w^omen, old and young, were collected together 
on the floor of a church about twelve or fifteen miles from the 
Cape, where many of them fortunately died under the brutal- 
ity to which they were subjected." Something of the same 
kind, on a very small scale, has lately resulted in that deplor- 
able lynching of Southern negroes which so puzzles unthinking 
Northern minds. To the conservative classes of old New 
England, in short, — to the men whom Gilbert Stuart had 
painted, and their sons, — the antislavery movement not only 
meant an attack on property, the institution on which civilisa- 



346 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

tion is based ; it not only proposed a violation of the Con- 
stitution, the compact on which our political security rests ; 
but in all probability it threatened to abandon the white 
women of half a continent to the lust of brutal savages. 

When at last, then, the antislavery movement began to 
gather disturbing force, this conservative opposition to it was as 
violent, as sincere, as deep, and in many aspects as admirable, 
as was the movement itself. But the fact that the conserva- 
tive temper of New England was not, as some antislavery 
men asserted, wicked, in no way involves what conservative 
New England passionately proclaimed, — namely, wickedness 
on the part of the antislavery men themselves. The truth is 
that an irrepressible social conflict was at hand, and that both 
sides were as honourable as were both sides during the Ameri- 
can Revolution, or during the Civil Wars of England. To 
the extreme antislavery men civilisation appeared a secondary 
consideration when human rights were concerned. Property ? 
If property cannot protect itself, away with property ! The 
Constitution ? If the Constitution is a compact with Hell, 
let the Constitution fall ! Liken it, if you will, to wedlock ; 
there are phases of wedlock more sinful than any divorce. 
And as for the lust of the negro, why, the negro is human, 
and human nature is excellent ! Enfranchise him, and God 
may be trusted to bring about the millennium. During the 
earlier phases of the antislavery movement it produced no 
pure literature ; but it did excite the most characteristic utter- 
ances of at least three orators who are still remembered among 
public speakers. 

The one of these who most clearly marks the relation of the 
antislavery movement to Unitarianism and Transcendentalism 
was the Reverend Theodore Parker. Born of country folk 
at Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1810, he graduated at Har- 
vard in 1834, and in 1837 he became a Unitarian minister. 
In the history of Unitarianism, he has a prominent place ; in 
the history of Transcendentalism, too, for his writings are 



THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT 347 

among the most vigorously specific in the '•'• Dial," to which 
he was a constant contributor ; but his most solid strength lay 
in his scholarship. There have been few men in New Eng- 
land whose learning has equalled his in range and in vitality. 
The manner in which his ardent nature impelled him to ex- 
press himself, however, was so far from what is generally 
characteristic of scholars that in popular memory his scholar- 
ship has almost been forgotten. As a Unitarian minister, 
Parker is remembered mostly for having carried individual 
preaching to its most unflinching conclusions. So far as one 
can judge, this preaching was actuated by unswerving devo- 
tion to what he believed true. The range of his scholarship 
had made him familiar with thousands of facts which seemed 
inconsistent with many forms of Christian tradition. These 
he unhesitatingly preached with a fervid eloquence which even 
in his own days, when New England oratory was at its height, 
commanded unusual attention. His teaching consequently 
carried Unitarianism so far from orthodox Christianity, in days 
when the Higher Criticism was still to come, that he did more 
than any other man to frighten less daring spirits into the 
Episcopal communion, which now maintains alliance with 
the ancestral church of England, As a Transcendentalist, 
Parker's enthusiastic and active temperament made him far 
more reformer than philosopher. He was content to let others 
pry into the secrets of the ideal eternities. What chiefly in- 
terested him were the lines of conduct which men ought to 
follow in view of the new floods of light ; and among these 
lines of conduct none seemed to him so important as that 
which should lead straightest to the abolition of slavery. He 
never lived to see his passionate purpose accomplished. In- 
tense activity broke down his health ; he died and was buried 
at Florence, whither he had gone for recuperation, in the 
spring of i860. 

Among his virtues and graces was not that of sympathy 
with opponents; and when it came to public utterances on 



348 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

the subject of abolition he indulged himself in a freedom of 
personal vituperation which, after the lapse of half a century, 
seems extreme. For this might be pleaded the excuse that 
Theodore Parker, like Garrison, sprang from that lower class 
of New England which never intimately understood its social 
superiors. A self-made man, however admirable, can rarely 
quite outgrow all the limitations of his origin. No such ex- 
cuse may be pleaded for the two other antislavery orators who 
are best remembered, — Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner. 
Born in the same year, 1811, both of these survived to hear 
the emancipation proclamation of 1863. Sumner remained 
an eminent member of the United States Senate until his 
death in 1874. Phillips survived ten years longer, but for 
the last twenty years of his life he did little else than exhibit 
the somewhat senile vagaries of a character whose leading 
passion seems to have become an ardour for disagreement 
with mankind. 

Phillips was born of the oldest New England gentry. 
Kinsmen of his had founded the academies of Exeter and An- 
dover, and his father had been the first Mayor of the city of 
Boston at a time when political power there still resided in 
the hands of.a few leading families. He graduated at Harvard 
College in 183 1, and in 1834 he was admitted to the bar. A 
man of extremely active and combative temperament, he sin- 
cerely wished to practise his profession ; but his position during 
the next two or three years was one frequent with young 
gentlemen of position and fortune. People who had legal 
business either gave it to established members of the bar, or 
else preferred young men who had the luck to need fees for 
their support. There can be little doubt that Phillips's failure 
to obtain practice did something to arouse that sentiment of 
opposition to his social equals which characterised his later 
life. A college classmate used to tell a story of him in 1837. 
For three years he had been a briefless barrister, and his class- 
mate, meeting him in the street, asked him good-humouredly 



THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT 349 

whether he had yet found any clients. Phillips's eyes flashed 
angrily : " No," he said \ " and if they don't come soon, I 
shall take up a cause." 

It was not long after the time of this probably apocryphal 
anecdote that a meeting was held in Faneuil Hall, where 
among other speakers the Attorney-General of Massachusetts 
defended the action of a western mob which in a frenzy of 
resentment had taken the life of Lovejoy, a very outspoken 
Abolitionist who had invaded their part of the country. Phil- 
lips was in the audience ; he interrupted the speaker, made 
his way to the platform, and then and there delivered an anti- 
slavery outburst which carried the audience by storm. So, 
having publicly declared war against society, by passionately 
inciting a public meeting to disregard the authority of that 
governing class to which he himself hereditarily belonged, he 
embarked on a lifelong demagogic career. 

There can be little question that he believed himself to 
believe in the antislavery cause which, with full knowledge of 
the social sacrifice involved, he chose to advocate when less 
than thirty years old. Nor can there be any doubt that the 
course of political agitation which he thus deliberately began, 
in the midst of a society dominated by traditional conservatism, 
demanded rare courage, physical and moral alike. For not 
only was he exposed to danger of personal violence from those 
considerable portions of the lower classes who were at first 
disposed to disagree with him, but he knew that the price he 
must pay for lifelong demagogism was to be regarded as an 
unprincipled fanatic by the people whom he would naturally 
have found most sympathetic. Throughout, too, his oratory 
was highly finished. A man of distinguished personal appear- 
ance, with all the grace and formal restraint of hereditary 
breeding, he had mastered, to a rare degree, the subtle art of 
first winning the sympathy of audiences, and then leading 
them, for the moment unresisting, to points where, on waking 
from his spell, they were astonished to find themselves. Many 



350 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

people, particularly of the less educated sort, ended by yielding 
themselves to his power. Of the better sort, more grew to 
feel that at heart this power was only the consummate adroit- 
ness of a man so impatient of rivalry as recklessly to indulge 
his inordinate passion for momentary dominance. His speeches 
were true speeches. In print, lacking the magic of his deliv- 
ery, they are like the words of songs which for lyric excellence 
need the melodies to which they have once been wedded. 
Whoever heard him speak remembers his performance with 
admiration. As the years pass, however, this admiration often 
proves qualified by suspicion that, with the light which was 
his, he might have refrained from those denunciations of estab- 
lished order which, to conservative thinking, still do mischief. 

Like Phillips, the other Bostonian orator whose name is 
associated with the antislavery movement sacrificed his 
social career to his principles. He did this, however, rather 
less deliberately j and throughout his life displayed a density 
of perception concerning his personal relation with the people 
whom in public utterances he violently denounced. Charles 
Sumner was born of a respectable family at Boston in i8ii ; 
he graduated at Harvard, became a lawyer, and before the age 
of thirty had spent three years in Europe, where he made 
permanent friendships. A man of fine and cultivated tastes, 
he appears at his best in the records of his lifelong intimacy 
with the poet Longfellow, Like Phillips's, his career began 
as one which might have been expected to carry on the old 
traditions of the cultivated classes of New England ; but he 
early found himself stirred by his fervent belief in the moral 
wrong of slavery. Sumner's sincere devotion to principle 
seems beyond question. The violence with which he per- 
mitted himself to abuse those who did not share his opinions, 
on the other hand, is still difficult to reconcile with the fact 
that, unlike Phillips, he felt personally aggrieved when they 
struck him off their visiting lists. 

This license of speech brought on Sumner the assault which 



THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT 351 

nearly made him a martyr. In 1856 he was a Senator from 
Massachusetts. During a debate which concerned slavery, he 
denounced one of the Senators from South Carolina in terms 
which abroad, or in our Southern States forty years ago, must 
inevitably have led to a duel. Personal abuse, indeed, could 
hardly have gone to greater length. As a New England 
man, Sumner was beyond the reach of a challenge, which it 
was assumed, with probable justice, that he would have handed 
over to the police, by way of binding the challenger to keep 
the peace. Accordingly, a relative of the distinguished old 
man whom he had attacked took the law into his own hands ; 
and entering the Senate Chamber, struck Sumner with a heavy 
cane and almost killed him. Northern sentiment has always 
held this an act of brutal cowardice. To the mind of the 
assailant, on the other hand, Sumner undoubtedly seemed a 
malignant creature, who had ventured on scurrility only be- 
cause the opinions of his constituents forbade him to risk his 
skin on the field of honour. The first blow, to be sure, was 
struck from behind ; it was struck, however, in the most 
public place in America; and, on the whole. Southern senti- 
ment seems to have approved it. As detailed in the second 
volume of Mr. Rhodes's "History of the United States," 
Sumner's blindly devoted virulence, on the one hand, and his 
assailant's conscientious violence, on the other, so startlingly 
indicate how Northern temper had diverged from Southern 
toward the time of the Civil War that the affair deserves 
our momentary attention. Our immediate concern, however, 
is rather with that State of Massachusetts which Sumner con- 
tinued to represent in the Senate until his death in 1874. 

To suppose that all antislavery people were scurrilous or 
demagogic would be as mistaken as to suppose them saints. 
From the beginning there was in Boston a growing company 
"of self-controlled antislavery men who deplored the unbridled 
harangues of militant reformers as sincerely as conservative 
people deplored the evils of slavery itself. So when the anti- 



352 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

slavery movement became politically potent in New England, 
there were many admirable people who did not hesitate to 
suffer the penalty of social disfavour involved in conscientious 
adherence to a principle whose most conspicuous advocates 
went to extremes which seemed to warrant it. The whole 
period has now passed into history. The better classes of 
Boston have long forgotten the prejudices which for a while 
deprived them of social relations with certain families now, 
as they always deserved to be, honourably distinguished. These 
same better classes, however, with their deep conservative con- 
victions, never quite forgave the violent utterances of Parker 
and Phillips and Sumner j they have never quite done justice 
to the fiery enthusiasm which might hardly have expressed it- 
self more reticently ; they have been apt to forget that their 
own denunciations of antislavery men were thoughtlessly un- 
measured ; and they have never forgotten that the ultimate 
dominance of the antislavery movement coincided with the 
final passing of political leadership in Massachusetts into the 
hands of another social class than that educated gentry who 
had retained it through all previous commotions from the 
foundation of the Puritan colony. 

But all this is not literature. We come now to a book 
produced by the antislavery movement, which suddenly 
proved that movement popular. This was Mrs. Stowe's 
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," published in 1852, the year after 
Sumner had entered the Senate from Massachusetts, and two 
years after Webster's Seventh of March Speech. 

Mrs. Stowe came of a family which during the middle half 
of the nineteenth century was noteworthy. To understand its 
peculiar position we must recall how the victory of Unitarianism 
in eastern Massachusetts had involved the social overthrow of 
orthodox Calvinism. Lyman Beecher, father of Mrs. Stowe, 
was born in Connecticut just at the beginning of the Revo- 
lution. Graduated at Yale under President Dwight, he be- 
came a Congregational minister in his native State. In 1826 



THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT 353 

he removed to Boston, where for six years his rudely energetic 
power proclaimed Calvinism in a stronghold of Unitarianism, 
which found his orthodoxy as offensive as Unitarianism itself 
would then have been found in England. 

At one in their deepest convictions with the historical 
traditions of New England religion, the Beechers conse- 
quently found themselves fiercely at war with the established, 
emancipated society in which they lived. This state of 
spirited, paradoxical conflict was favourable to the develop- 
ment of their considerable eccentricity. The most eminent 
of Mrs. Stowe's brothers, Henry Ward Beecher, a devoted 
antislavery man, and the most popular American preacher of 
his day, queerly combined orthodoxy with liberalism ; he was 
almost equally eminent for unquestionable power and for ques- 
tionable taste ; but his career belongs to the history neither of 
literature nor of New England. It culminated, as is gener- 
ally remembered, in his many years' pastorate of that Ply- 
mouth Church in Brooklyn, New York, which kept within 
the forms of orthodoxy an enormous congregation of the less 
educated sort. 

Harriet Beecher, in literature the most distinguished of her 
family, was born at Litchfield, Connecticut, where her father 
was settled, in 181 2. In 1832 her father removed from 
Boston to Cincinnati, where for twenty years he was the 
President of a theological seminary. Here, in 1836, Harriet 
Beecher married the Reverend Calvin Stowe, who, like her- 
self, had ardent antislavery sympathies. They were poor, 
and their marriage was prolific. In ordinary domestic duties 
Mrs. Stowe had more to do than most women ; but her activ- 
ity was such that throughout her busiest domestic days her 
mind was constantly though not systematically occupied with 
the reform which she did so much to further. Living for 
years just on the borderland of the slave States and the free, 
she acquired a personal familiarity with slavery shared by few 
Northern people ; and at odd times she was constantly prac- 



354 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

tising her pen. In 1850, the year of Webster's Seventh of 
March Speech, her husband was appointed a professor at 
Bowdoin College. At Brunswick, Maine, then, in 1851 and 
1852, Mrs. Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the object 
of which was to set forth in concrete form the actual horrors 
of slavery. At first little noticed, this book rapidly attracted 
popular attention. During the next five years above half a 
million copies were sold in the United States alone ; and it 
is hardly excessive to say that wherever " Uncle Tom's 
Cabin " went, public conscience was aroused. 

Written carelessly, and full of crudities, " Uncle Tom's 
Cabin," even after forty-eight years, remains a remarkable 
piece of fiction. The truth is, that almost unawares Mrs. 
Stowe had in her the stuff of which good novelists are made. 
Her plot, to be sure, is conventional and rambling ; but her 
characters, even though little studied in detail, have a perva- 
sive vitality which no study can achieve ; you unhesitatingly 
accept them as real. Her descriptive power, meanwhile, was 
such as to make equally convincing the backgrounds in which 
her action and her characters move. What is more, these 
backgrounds, some of which she knew from personal experi- 
ence, are probably so faithful to actual nature that the local 
sentiment aroused as you read them may be accepted as gener- 
ally true. And though Mrs. Stowe's book was written in spare 
moments, almost anyhow, amid the distractions of housekeep- 
ing and of a growing family, her careless style is often strong 
and vivid. 

Should any one doubt Mrs. Stowe's power as a writer, re- 
membering only that in " Uncle Tom's Cabin " she achieved 
a great popular success, partly caused by the changing public 
opinion of her day, we need only glance at some of her later 
work to make sure that she had in her a power which, if cir- 
cumstances had permitted its development, might have given 
her a distinguished place in English fiction. Her best book 
is probably "Old Town Folks," published in 1869. Like 



THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT 355 

all her work, this rambling story of life near Boston about the 
beginning of the nineteenth century is careless in detail and 
very uneven. As you consider it, however, you grow to feel 
that above almost any other accessible book " Old Town 
Folks " sets forth the circumstances and the temper of the 
native Yankee people. What is more, the carefully deliberate 
passages — the opening chapters, for example — are written 
in a manner which approaches excellence. In brief, Mrs. 
Stowe differed from most American novelists in possessing a 
spark of genius. Had this genius pervaded her work, she 
might have been a figure of lasting literary importance. 

Even as it was, she had power enough to make " Uncle 
Tom's Cabin " the most potent literary force of the anti- 
slavery days. She differed from most Abolitionists in having 
apparently had some opportunity to observe slavery. Until 
the publication of " Uncle Tom's Cabin," slavery had on the 
whole presented itself to the North as a deplorable abstrac- 
tion. Wherever the book went, — and it went so far that 
to this day dramatised versions of it are said to be popular in 
the country, — it awakened this abstraction into life, much as 
powerful preaching sometimes awakens a dormant sentiment of 
religion. Of course, " Uncle Tom's Cabin " is partisan, but 
it is honestly so ; and if, as occasionally seems the case, the 
negro characters are so white at heart that there is a certain 
fitness in their dramatic representation by people with tempo- 
rarily blackened faces, there can be no doubt that Mrs. Stowe 
believed her negroes as true to life as later, and rightly, she 
believed the Yankees of " Old Town Folks." Whatever you 
may think of " Uncle Tom's Cabin," you can never truly 
feel it to have been instigated by a demagogic purpose. It 
was written by one who, like the men who maintained anti- 
slavery principles amid every social obloquy and could never 
have foreseen their final popularity, was profoundly convinced 
that her cause was supremely true. 

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" was published in 1852. To its 



356 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

unprecedented popularity may be perhaps traced the final turn 
of the public tide. After ten years the conflict between the 
slave States and the free reached the inevitable point of civil 
war. The ist of January, 1863, saw that final proclamation 
of emancipation which, by confiscating, as virtually contra- 
band property, all slaves in the States which were then in 
arms against the Federal government, practically achieved the 
end for which the antislavery men had unfalteringly striven. 

Into political history we cannot enter. For obvious reasons 
there has arisen during the last twenty-five years an anti- 
slavery legend, which has cast into an obloquy as deep as ever 
Abolitionists suff^ered the memory of every opposition to these 
men, whose chief heroism lay in their unflinching devotion 
to unpopular principle. In so far as this legend has led the 
growing generation of American youth to assume that because 
you happen to think a given form of property wrong, you 
have a natural right to confiscate it forthwith, the antislavery 
movement has perhaps tended to weaken the security of 
American institutions. At least in Massachusetts, too, the 
prevalence of this movement seems permanently to have 
lowered the personal dignity of public life, by substituting for 
the traditional rule of the conservative gentry the obvious 
dominance of the less educated classes. These shadows on 
the picture have been so generally neglected that we have 
perhaps allowed ourselves to dwell on them unduly. As fact 
begins to fade into history, it is sometimes the critical aspects 
of it which the world proves apt for a while to forget. 

No doubt the evil of slavery was real ; no doubt the spirit 
in which the antislavery movement attacked it was conscien- 
tious, brave, in many aspects heroic ; but neither can there be 
doubt that the antislavery leaders of New England were of 
different origin from the Southerners whom they denounced, 
and that they mostly knew only by report the things which they 
abhorred. In the history of the South, for one thing, social 
and intellectual development had proceeded more slowly than 



THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT 357 

in the North. The social and intellectual development of 
America has never proceeded so fast as that of England. 
The England of King William III. was far more different 
from the England of Queen Elizabeth than was the Boston 
of Joseph Dudley from that of John Winthrop. In the same 
way there was far more likeness between the Southern States of 
President Buchanan's time and the Southern States of General 
Washington's than between the New England of i860 and 
the New England of 1789. Up to the time of the Civil 
War, indeed, the South still lingered in the eighteenth cen- 
tury ; and at least in New England the force of what we 
have called its Renaissance was bringing men nearer to the 
contemporary nineteenth century of Europe than anything 
American between 1650 and 1800 had ever been to any 
Europe contemporary with itself. 

Yet in the fact that the impulses of the New England 
reformers to set the world right finally concentrated themselves 
on the affairs of other people, and not on their own, there 
proves to be a trait which reveals how little the temper of 
New England has ever strayed from the temper of the mother 
country. For no peculiarity has been more characteristic of 
the native English than a passion to reform other people than 
themselves, trusting meantime that God will help those who 
forcibly help somebody else. 



IX 

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 

Among the antislavery leaders of Massachusetts was one who, 
with the passing of time, seems more and more distinguished as 
a man of letters. John Greenleaf Whittier, born at Haverhill, 
Massachusetts, in 1807, came of sound country stock, remark- 
able only because for several generations the family had been 
Quakers. The first New England manifestations of Quaker- 
ism, in the seventeenth century, had taken an extravagantly 
fanatical form, which resulted in tragedies still familiar to 
tradition. As the Friends of New England had settled down 
into peaceful observance of their own principles, however, let- 
ting alone the affairs of others, they had become an inconspicu- 
ous, inoffensive body, neglected by the surrounding orthodoxy. 
Theologically, they believed in God, Jesus Christ, and the 
Bible. The interpreter of the divine word they found not in 
any established church nor in any officially sanctified order of 
ministers, but in the still, small voice given to mankind by the 
Heavenly Father. 

" To all human beings, they held, God has given an inner light, to 
all He speaks with a still small voice. Follow the light, obey the voice, 
and all will be well. Evil-doers are they who neglect the light and 
the voice. Now the light and the voice are God's, so to all who will 
attend they must ultimately show the same truth. If the voice call 
us to correct others, then, or the light shine upon manifest evil, it is 
God's will that we smite error, if so may be by revealing truth. 
If those who err be Friends, our duty bids us expostulate with them ; 
and if they be obdurate, to present them for discipline, which may 
result in their exclusion from our Religious Society. The still small 
voice, it seems, really warns everybody that certain lines of conduct 
are essentially wrong, — among which are the drinking of spirits, 
the frequenting of taverns, indulgence in gaming, the use of oaths, and 
the enslavement of any human being." 



WHITTIER 359 

In this faith there is clearly involved a conclusion at odds 
with Calvinism. To Quakers, inasmuch as every man pos- 
sesses within himself the power of seeing the inner light and 
of hearing the still, small voice of God, all men are essentially 
equal. When the antislavery movement began, then, Whit- 
tier, a lifelong adherent of this traditional faith, found himself 
in a relation to militant philanthropy very different from that 
of ancestral Calvinists. These, lately emancipated by the new 
life of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, came to the reform 
with all the hotness of head which marks converts. Whittier, 
on the other hand, had inherited the principles to which the 
men with whom he allied himself had been converted ; and so, 
although a lifelong and earnest reformer, he is the least irritating 
of reformers to those who chance not to agree with him. 

Again, sprung from a class which made his childhood liter- 
ally that of a barefoot boy, and growing up in days when the 
New England country was still pure in the possession of an 
unmixed race whose capacity for self-government has never 
been surpassed, Whittier naturally and gently, without a tinge 
of invidiousness, could base not only on religious theory, but 
also on personal inexperience, his fervent faith in the equality 
of mankind. In the fact that throughout his connection with 
the antislavery movement he unswervingly advocated the use 
of strictly constitutional means to bring about reform, there is 
again something deeply characteristic. From the beginning 
some abolitionists were for resort to force; but Whittier always 
believed that their end might be attained by the ballot. For, 
after all, an election is an opportunity given every mature 
man in the community, to declare by his vote what ought to 
be done and who ought to do it. Very good ; if, as Whittier's 
faith taught him, God speaks to every human being who will 
Hsten, the voice of the people, provided they listen to the 
voice within them, is literally the voice of God. When a 
popular election goes wrong, it is only because the people have 
been deaf to the divine whisper of truth. 



36o THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

Whittier's youth was passed in the Yankee country. His 
education never went beyond country schools and two terms 
at the Haverhill Academy ; but he had a natural love for lit- 
erature. When he was nineteen years old, a poem of his was 
printed in the Newburyport " Free Press," then edited by 
William Lloyd Garrison. At twenty-one he was already a 
professional writer for country newspapers. At twenty-three 
he was editor of the " Haverhill Gazette." A year later he 
was made editor of a paper in Hartford, Connecticut ; but his 
health, never robust, troubled him, and he returned to Massa- 
chusetts. In 1 83 1 he published his first volume, a little book 
of verses called " New England Legends ; " and during the 
same year, that in which Garrison established the " Liberator " 
at Boston, he became actively and ardently interested in the 
movement against slavery. Until 1 840 this kept him constantly 
busy ; in that year he resigned his charge of the " Pennsyl- 
vania Freeman," — a journal devoted to the cause of abolition 
in Philadelphia. He removed to Amesbury, Massachusetts, 
where he lived thenceforth. From 1826 until the end, no 
year went by without his publishing poems. His tempera- 
ment was shy, and his later life uneventful. He died just 
across the border of New Hampshire in 1892. 

Though Whittier was precocious, and his literary career 
extended over more than sixty-five years, he was not prolific. 
He never wrote much at a time, and he never wrote anything 
long. In the seven volumes of his collected works there are 
very few which might not have been produced at a single sit- 
ting. Again, his work throughout these sixty-five years was 
far from varied in character; like Bryant, he rarely excelled 
himself and rarely fell below. The limited circumstances of 
his life combined with lack of humour to make his writings 
superficially commonplace. What gives them merit are oc- 
casional passages where simplicity emerges from common- 
place into dignity and sometimes into passion. For half a 
century, Bryant remained correct and delicately sentimen- 



WHITTIER 361 

cal ; for longer still Whittier remained simple, sincere, and 
fervent. 

His masterpiece, if the word be not excessive, is " Snow- 
Bound," written when he was about fifty-seven years old. 
At that time, when most of his immediate family were dead, 
he tenderly recalled his memories of childhood. The vivid 
simplicity of his descriptions every one must feel ; his picture 
of a winter evening at his old home, for example, almost 
appeals to the eye : — 

" Shut in from all the world without, 
We sat the clean-winged hearth about, 
Content to let the north-wind roar 
In baffled rage at pane and door, 
While the red logs before us beat 
The frost line back with tropic heat ; 
And ever, when a louder blast 
Shook beam and rafter as it passed, 
The merrier up its roaring draught 
The great throat of the chimney laughed ; 
The house-dog on his paws outspread 
Lay to the fire his drowsy head, 
The cat's dark silhouette on the wall 
A couchant tiger's seemed to fall ; 
And, for the winter fireside meet. 
Between the andirons' straggling feet, 
The mug of cider simmered slow. 
The apples sputtered in a row. 
And close at hand the basket stood 
With nuts from brown October's wood." 

Nor is the merit of " Snow-Bound " merely descriptive. 
Throughout it you will find phrases which, except for mere 
lyric music, have a simple felicity almost final. Take the 
couplet, for example, in which he speaks of his aunt, no 
longer young, who never married : — 

" All unprofaned she held apart 
The virgin fancies of the heart." 

Or take the lines in which he remembers a sister, dead 
early in life : — 



362 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

" And while in life's late afternoon, 
Where cool and long the shadows grow, 
I walk to meet the night that soon 
Shall shape and shadow overflow^ 
I cannot feel that thou art far." 

Throughout " Snow-Bound " you may discover lines as 
excellent as these. 

Quite apart from its artistic merit, " Snow-Bound " is an 
important document for one who would understand the native 
Yankee country. " Flemish pictures of old days/' Whittier 
calls the poem ; and in one sense the term is happy. He 
lovingly sets forth a very simple form of existence, with a 
minute detail something like that of the Flemish painters. 
Typical Flemish pictures, however, representing a European 
peasantry whose life is consciously that of an inferior class, 
abound in touches which indicate profound coarseness of tem- 
per. No Flemish life could have been humbler, none more 
simple, than the life which " Snow-Bound " pictures ; but this 
life of self-respecting dignity is utterly free from the grossness 
which usually depraves the lower ranks of any old, complex 
society. One begins to see how the national inexperience 
of New England was bound to teach earnest Yankees those 
lessons of human equality which Whittier never for a moment 
doubted. 

Such vividness as distinguishes the descriptive passages of 
" Snow-Bound " transpires throughout Whittier's descriptive 
verse. Here, for example, are some lines which take one to 
the very heart of our drowsy New England summers : — 

" Along the roadside, like the flowers of gold 
The tawny Incas for their gardens wrought, 
Heavy with sunshine droops the golden-rod, 
And the red pennons of the cardinal flowers 
Hang motionless upon their upright staves. 
The sky is hot and hazy, and the wind, 
Wing-weary with its long flight from the soudl, 
Unfelt ; yet, closely scanned, yon maple leaf 
With faintest motion, as one stirs in dreams. 



WHITTIER 363 

Confesses it. The locust by the wall 
Stabs the noon-silence with his sharp alarm. 
A single hay-cart down the dusty road 
Creaks slowly, with its driver fast asleep 
On the load's top. Against the neighbouring hill, 
Huddled along the stone-wall's shady side, 
The sheep show white, as if a snow-drift still 
Defied the dog-star. Through the open door 
A drowsy smell of flowers — gray heliotrope, 
And white sweet clover, and shy mignonette — 
Comes faintly in, and silent chorus lend 
To the prevailing symphony of peace." 

And here are more lines, which always come to mind when 
one looks across the salt-marshes of Hampton : — 

" Just then the ocean seemed 
To lift a half-faced moon in sight ; 
And shoreward o'er the waters gleamed, 
From crest to crest, a line of light. 



"^o 



" Silently for a space each eye 
Upon that sudden glory turned ; 
Cool from the land the breeze blew by, 
The tent-ropes flapped, the long beach churned 
Its waves to foam ; on either hand 
Stretched, far as sight, the hills of sand ; 
With bays of marsh, and capes of bush and tree. 
The woods' black shore line loomed beyond the meadowy sea." 

Superficially commonplace, if you will, passages like these, 
as they grow familiar, prove more and more admirable in 
their simple truth. Of course they lack lyric beauty. Whit- 
tier's metrical range was very narrow, and his rhymes were 
often abominable. But whenever he dealt with the country 
he knew so well, he had an instinctive perception of those 
obvious facts which are really most characteristic, and within 
which are surely included its unobtrusive beauty and its slowly 
winning charm. With this excellent simplicity of perception 
he combined excellent simplicity of heart and phrase. 

In general, of course, the most popular literature is narra- 



364 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

tive. So Whittier's Yankee ballads often seem his most 
obvious works, — " Skipper Ireson's Ride," for example, or 
that artlessly sentimental " Maud Muller," where a New 
England judge is made to play the part of a knight-errant of 
romance. Like his admirable poetry of Nature, these are 
simple and sincere. In sentiment, too, the first is fervid. 
Both in conception and in phrase, however, these, with all 
the rest we may let them stand for, are so commonplace 
that one finds critical admiration out of the question. They 
belong to that school of verse which perennially flourishes 
and withers in the poetical columns of country newspapers. 

Whittier's true claim to remembrance will rest on no such 
popularity as this, even though that popularity chance to be 
more than momentary. In the first place, his simple pictures 
of New England Nature are often excellent. In the second 
place, the fervour of his lifelong faith in the cause of human 
freedom sometimes breathed undying fire into the verses which 
he made concerning the conflict with slavery. Throughout 
them his faults appear. In 1836 Congress passed a bill 
excluding from the United States Post Office all Abolitionist 
publications; against this bill Whittier wrote a passionate 
" Summons to the North," which among other verses con- 
tains the following : — 

"Torture the pages of the Holy Bible, 

To sanction crime, and robbery, and blood? 
And in oppression's hateful service libel 
Both man and God ? " 

Worse rhymes than he thus comprised in four lines, you 
shall search the language for in vain ; but in that same poem 
arc stanzas like these : — 

" Methinks from all her wild, green mountains ; 
From valleys where her slumbering fathers He 
From her blue rivers and her welling fountains, 
And clear cold sky : 



WHITTIER 36s 

" From her rough coast and isles, which hungry Ocean 
Gnaws with his surges ; from the fisher's skiff, 
With white sail swaying to the billows' motion 
Round rock and cliff ; 

" From the free fireside of her unbought farmer ; 
From her free labourer at his loom and wheel ; 
From the brown smith-shop, where, beneath the hammer, 
Rings the red steel ; 

" From each and all, if God hath not forsaken 
Our land, and left us to an evil choice, 
Loud as the summer thunderbolt shall waken 
A People's voice." 

Seven years later, when the Fugitive Slave Law was en- 
forced in Boston, he wrote that passionate address, " Massa- 
chusetts to Virginia," of which the following passage is an 
example ; — 

" From Norfolk's ancient villages, from Plymouth's rocky bound 
To where Nantucket feels the arms of ocean close her round ; 

" From rich and rural Worcester, where through the calm repose 
Of cultured vales and fringing woods the gentle Nashua flows, 
To where Wachuset's wintry blasts the mountain larches stir, 
Swelled up to Heaven the thrilling cry of ' God save Latimer ! ' 

" And sandy Barnstable rose up, wet with the salt sea spray ; 
And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narragansett Bay ! 
Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill, 
And the cheer of Hampshire's woodmen swept down from Holyoke 
Hill. 

" The voice of Massachusetts ! Of her free sons and daughters, 
Deep calling unto deep aloud, the sound of many waters ! 
Against the burden of that voice what tyrant power shall stand? 
No fetters in the Bay State ! No slave upon her land ! " 

War, of course, was utterly abhorrent to his Quaker prin- 
ciples ; but when inevitable war came, he greeted it in such 
spirit as this : — 



266 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

" We see not, know not ; all our way 
Is night — with Thee alone is day : 
From out the torrent's troubled drift, 
Above the storm our prayers we lift, 
Thy will be done ! 

*' Strike, Thou the Master, we Thy keys, 
The anthem of the destinies ! 
The minor of Thy loftier strain. 
Our hearts shall breathe the old refrain, 
Thy will be done ! " 

And when in 1865 the amendment to the Constitution, 
abolishing slavery, was at last adopted, he wrote perhaps his 
noblest poem, " Laus Deo," of which these three stanzas may 
show the quality : — 

" It is done! 

Clang of bell and roar of gun 
Send the tidings up and down. 

How the belfries rock and reel ! 

How the great guns, peal on peal, 
Fling the joy from town to town ! 



" Did we dare. 

In our agony of prayer, 
Ask for more than He has done? 

When was ever His right hand 

Over any time or land 
Stretched as now beneath the sun ? 

" Ring and swing, 
Bells of joy ! On morning's wing 

Send the song of praise abroad ! 
With a sound of broken chains 
Tell the nations that He reigns 

Who alone is Lord and God ! " 

At heart Whittier was no more stirred than were the other 
antislavery leaders, nor was he gifted with such literary power 
as sometimes revealed itself in the speeches of Parker or of 
Phillips, or as enlivened Mrs. Stowe's novel with its gleams 
of creative genius. But Whittier surpassed all the rest in the 



WHITTIER 367 

impregnable siAipHcity of his inborn temper, derived from his 
Quaker ancestry and nurtured by the guilelessness of his 
personal life. 

Another trait he possessed, and a trait rare in tempera- 
ments eager for reform. This is magnanimity. It appears 
nowhere more clearly than in almost the only departure from 
chronological order in the final collection of his works, which 
he himself arranged. Until 1850, Webster, whose devotion 
to the ideal of Union had compelled him to oppose every 
aggression of the South, had been held by the antislavery men 
an heroic leader. His Seventh of March Speech, which 
supported a Fugitive Slave Bill, brought down on him a storm 
of antislavery indignation never expressed more fervently 
than in a poem by Whittier, still generally included in popular 
collections of American lyrics. He called this poem " Icha- 
bod i " and here are some of its verses : — 

" So fallen ! so lost ! the light withdrawn 
Which once he wore ! 
The glory from his grey hairs gone 
Forevermore ! 

" Let not the land once proud of him 
Insult him now, 
Nor brand with deeper shame the dim, 
Dishonoured brow. 

" But let its humbled sons instead, 
From sea to lake, 
A long lament, as for the dead, 
In sadness make. 



" Then pay the reverence of old days 
To his dead fame ; 
Walk backwards, with averted gaze, 
And hide the shame ! " 

In 1850 no man condemned Webster more fiercely than 
Whittier. No more sincere poem than " Ichabod " was ever 
written. But two years after " Ichabod " saw the light, 



368 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

Webster was dead ; and it was nine years more before the 
Civil War came ; and Whittier survived the Civil War for 
nearly a generation. In 1880, reflecting on the past, he 
wrote about Webster again. This poem he called the " Lost 
Occasion," and in his collected works he put it directly after 
the "Ichabod" which he had so fervently written thirty years 
before. The " Lost Occasion " has generally been neglected 
by the makers of American anthologies, so " Ichabod " is tradi- 
tionally supposed to express Whittier's final feeling about 
Daniel Webster. In this case tradition is unjust to both 
men. The single deviation from chronology in Whittier's 
collected works shows that the poet desired his final senti- 
ment concerning our greatest statesman to be phrased in no 
lines of fervid denunciation, but rather in such words as 
these : — « 

" Thou shouldst have lived to feel below 
Thy feet Disunion's fierce upthrow ; 
The late-sprung mine that underlaid 
Thy sad concessions vainly made. 
Thou shouldst have seen from Sumter's wall 
The star flag of the Union fall, 
And armed rebeUion pressing on 
The broken lines of Washington. 

" No stronger voice than thine had then 
Called out the utmost might of men, 
To make the Union's charter free 
And strengthen law by liberty. 

" Wise men and strong we did not lack ; 
But still, with memory turning back, 
In the dark hours we thought of thee, 
And thy lone grave beside the sea. 



' But, where thy native mountains bare 
Their foreheads to diviner air, 
Fit emblem of enduring fame. 
One lofty summit keeps thy name. 
For thee the cosmic forces did 
The rearing of that pyramid. 



WHITTIER 369 

The prescient ages shaping with 

Fire, flood, and frost thy monolith. 

Sunrise and sunset lay thereon 

With hands of light their benison, 

The stars of midnight pause to set 

Their jewels in its coronet. 

And evermore that mountain mass 

Seems cHmbing from the shadowy pass 

To light, as if to manifest 

Thy nobler self, thy life at best ! " 

Throughout the records of antislavery you may find pas- 
sionate indignation and self-devoted sincerity ; but you shall 
search those records far and v^^ide before you shall find a mate 
for this magnanimous utterance. As time passes, Whittier 
seems more and more the man among the antislavery leaders 
of New England v^^hose spirit came nearest to greatness. 

So, as the years pass, he tends to emerge from the group 
of mere reformers, and to range himself too with the true 
men of letters. To them — to the literature of renascent 
New England, as distinguished from its politics, its scholar- 
ship, its religion, its philosophy, or its reform — we are now 
to turn. And we have come to this literature almost in- 
sensibly, in considering the work of one who, beginning life as 
a passionate reformer, may remain for posterity a living poet. 



THE " ATLANTIC MONTHLY '* 

In the autumn of 1857 there appeared in Boston the first 
number of the periodical, still in existence, which more than 
anything else represents the literature of the New England 
Renaissance. In the early years of the century, the charac- 
teristic publication of literary Boston was the " North Ameri- 
can Review." In the 40's the " Dial," limited as was its 
circulation, was equally characteristic of contemporary lit- 
erary energy. From 1857 until the renascent literature of 
New England came to an end, its vehicle was the " Atlantic 
xMonthly." 

This youngest and last of the native periodicals of Boston 
may be distinguished from its predecessors in various ways. 
Obviously, for one thing, while the primary function of the 
" North American Review " was scholarly, and that of the 
"Dial" philosophic, that of the "Atlantic" was literary. 
In the second place, the " North American Review " was 
started by young men who at the moment had no vehicle for 
expression, and who thought they had a good deal to say. 
The "Dial" was similarly started by a group of enthusiasts 
comparatively little known in letters. The " Atlantic," on 
the other hand, did little more than establish a regular means 
of publication for men whose reputation was already estab- 
lished. After the dignified fashion of half a century ago, the 
articles in its earlier numbers were not signed. Whoever 
takes the trouble to ascertain their writers, however, will be 
surprised to find how few of them had not attained distinc- 
tion before 1857. In more senses than one, the earlier 



THE ''ATLANTIC MONTHLY" 371 

periodicals began youthfully; and the "Atlantic" was always 
mature. 

To understand the mature literature which at last thus 
concentrated, we have spent what may have seemed exces- 
sive time on its environment. Yet without a constant sense 
of the influences which were alive in the New England air, 
the literature which finally arose there can hardly be under- 
stood. It was all based on the traditions of a rigid old 
society, Puritan in origin and immemorially fixed in structure. 
To this, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, came 
that impulse of new life which expressed itself in such 
varied ways, — in the classically rounded periods of our most 
finished oratory ; in the scholarship which ripened into our 
lasting works of history; in the hopeful dreams of the Uni- 
tarians, passing insensibly into the nebulous philosophy of the 
Transcendentalists, and finally into first fantastic and soon 
militant reform. Each of these phases of our Renaissance 
gave us names which are still worth memory : Webster, 
Everett, and Choate ; Ticknor, Prescott, Motley, and Park- 
man ; Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau; Theodore 
Parker, Phillips, and Sumner; Mrs. Stowe, and Whittier. 
Thus grouped together, we can see these people to have been 
so dissimilar, and sometimes so antagonistic, that human friend- 
ship between them, or even mutual understanding, was hardly 
possible. At the same time, as we look at them together, we 
must see that all possessed in common a trait which marks 
them as of the old New England race. Each and all were 
strenuously earnest ; and though the earnestness of some con- 
fined itself to matters of this world, — to history, to politics, 
or to reform, — while that of others was centred, like that 
of the Puritan fathers, more on the unseen eternities, not one 
of them was ever free from a constant ideal of principle, of 
duty. Nor was the idealism of these men always confined to 
matters of conduct. In Emerson, more certainly than in the 
fathers themselves, one feels the ceaseless effort of New 



372 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

England to grasp, to understand, to formulate the realities 
which must forever lie beyond human ken. The New Eng- 
landers of our Renaissance were no longer Puritans ; they 
had discarded the grim dogmas of Calvinism ; but so far as 
Puritanism was a hfelong effort to recognise and to follow 
ideals which can never be apprehended by unaided human 
senses, they were still Puritan at heart. 

Herein lies the trait which most clearly distinguishes New 
England from those neighbouring Middle States where the 
letters of America sprang into life a few years earlier. In 
both, the impulse to expression which appeared so early in 
the nineteenth century may be held only an American phase 
of the world-wide tendency to revolution which during the 
century effected so many changes in Europe. To both, too, 
this impulse came in a guise which may make the term " Re- 
naissance " seem applicable equally to both. In New York, 
however, the impulse tended immediately to the production of 
an imitative literature which had done its best work by 
1832; in New England, meanwhile, that same year, which is 
so convenient a landmark, was marked chiefly by Emerson's 
sermon on the Lord's Supper. Oratory was at its best; 
scholarship was swiftly developing ; Unitarianism had com- 
pletely dominated Boston ; Transcendentalism was just begin- 
ning its course of wild, disintegrant luxuriance; and not only 
destructive reform but pure letters too were still to come. The 
humours of any period often show its characteristics most 
plainly. There is an aspect in which the name of Scriptures, 
by which Bronson Alcott chose to call his philosophic diaries, 
seems comically applicable to all the earlier writing of the New 
England where he calmly displayed his innocence of common- 
sense. When a new impulse came to the children of the Puri- 
tans, their first instinctive effort was to formulate a new law and 
gospel. 

This new law and gospel was concerned with a spirit 
hitherto strange to the region, the spirit to which the cant of 



THE ''ATLANTIC MONTHLY" 373 

later days has given the name of Culture. Ancestral New 
England knew the Bible, the Common Law, the formal 
traditions of the older classical education, and little else. 
With the Renaissance there came at last to New England 
an eager knowledge of all the other phases of human 
thought and expression which enrich the records of modern 
civilisation. The temper in which this new learning was 
received there is nowhere better typified than by the title and 
the contents of a book which preserves some lectures given by 
Emerson in 1844, — the year when the " Dial" faded out of 
existence. "Representative Men" is the name of it, — a 
name which suggests those countless volumes of contemporary 
biography wherein successful men of business are frequently 
invited to insert their lives and portraits at an expense so 
slight as to be within reach of any respectable citizen 
of every considerable village. Emerson's " Representative 
Men " were of different stripe from these. The personages 
whom he chose to group under his every -day title were Plato, 
the Philosopher ; Swedenborg, the Mystic ; Montaigne, the 
Sceptic ; Shakspere, the Poet ; Napoleon, the Man of the 
World ; and Goethe, the Writer. To Emerson, in short, and 
to the New England of which in his peculiar phrase he was a 
representative man, the whole range of literature was suddenly 
opened. Two centuries of national inexperience had deprived 
the region not only of critical power, but for the moment of 
all suspicion that this was lacking. With the fresh enthusiasm 
of discovery New England faced this newly found company 
of the good and great, feeling chiefly that even like ourselves 
these were men. To any who hold fervent faith in the 
excellence of human nature the fact of common humanity 
must seem the chief of all. Plato was a man, and Swedenborg, 
and the rest. We are men, too. Let us meet our elder 
brethren, face to face, asking what they may have to tell us. 
We shall be glad to hear, and doubtless they will gladly 
be heard. The mood is like that of good old Father Taylor, 



374 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

the sailor-preacher of Boston Methodism. By some odd 
chance, he once got into the presence of Gregory XVI., 
and he is said, in describing the incident, to have ended, in 
all gravity, with the words, " So the Pope blessed me, and I 
blessed the Pope." 

Fifty years and more have done their work since those 
aspiring old times. From contemporary New England the 
fact of greatness obscures the humanity of all classic letters, 
ancient or modern. In the full flush of our Renaissance, on 
the other hand, there was left in us something like the artless 
unconsciousness of healthy children. No wonder, then, we 
were a little slow to make pure letters for ourselves. It is 
not that we lacked them, of course. The names we have 
already considered belong not only to the history of those 
various phases of Renaissance with which we have chosen to 
consider them, but to that of letters, too. Hardly any of these 
men, however, was primarily a maker of literature. All de- 
serve distinction in literary history chiefly because they did 
with loving care the writing which they held their earthly 
business. 

Naturally, then, the literature of New England was compar- 
atively slow in reaching maturity. It is more than an accident 
of date that the years when the " Knickerbocker Maga- 
zine " began to fade out of New York, and with it the whole 
elder school of which it marked the blameless decline, saw in 
Boston the establishment of the first periodical whose function 
was chiefly literary. The innocent old literature of pleasure 
which began with the novels of Brockden Brown was truly 
exhausted. The literature of New England, meanwhile, 
which had been ripening as its elder was falling into decay, 
had only just reached the point where it demanded a reg- 
ular vehicle of expression. This vehicle Came, to be sure, only 
when the strength of the New England Renaissance was 
beginning to fail. None of the New England men of letters, 
however, had begun to feel the infirmities of age, when one 



THE ''ATLANTIC MONTHLY'' 375 

and all found a common meeting-ground in the pages of the 
"Atlantic Monthly." 

The " Atlantic " is thus associated with almost every name 
eminent in our later New England letters ; but most closely 
of all, perhaps, with that of a man whose presence in Boston, 
from 1834 until his death in 1881, had incalculable influence 
on local literary life. This was James Thomas Fields, 
for many years publisher of the "Atlantic," and from 1862 
to 1870 its editor. 

Fields was a self-made man, born in 18 16 at Ports- 
mouth, New Hampshire, and educated only in the common 
schools there. When a mere boy he began active life as 
a clerk in a Boston book store. Like many intelligent 
Yankees he had business ability ; at twenty-two he was 
already partner in a publishing house ; and he remained an 
active publisher in Boston for thirty-five years, retiring with 
a comfortable fortune. What makes Fields memorable, 
however, are not his practical gifts, nor yet the fact that in a 
modest way he was himself a man of letters. His most 
familiar poem implies his limits. This " Ballad of the Tem- 
pest " tells the story of a storm at sea. Things go very 
wrong until 

" * We are lost,' the captain shouted, 
As he staggered down the stairs. 
But his little daughter whispered, 
As she took his icy hand, 
' Is n't God upon the ocean, 

Just the same as on the land ? ' " 

And the next morning they come safe to harbour. All of 
which, though very pretty and moral, expresses a course of 
marine conduct quite inconceivable when you reflect that 
the author was brought up in a still busy Yankee seaport. 
So far as Fields was a poet or merely a man of business, 
he might be dismissed as unimportant. 

And yet it is doubtful whether any one had greater or better 



3/6 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

influence on the literature of New England. From boyhood 
Fields devotedly loved letters ; and his literary enthusiasm 
combined with great personal amiability and with sympathetic 
kindness of nature to make him, before he reached middle life, 
the intimate personal friend of every man of letters in New 
England, and of many such men in the old world too. The 
result of this is evident to any one who will glance at the 
trade-lists of the firm of which he was for years the head. 
Here, to go no further, you will find all the works of Emerson, 
Thoreau, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and Haw- 
thorne. There are plenty of other honourable American names 
there, too, as well as those of eminent foreign writers. For 
one thing, Fields was the first to collect and to set forth in 
systematic form the work of Thomas De Quincey, until Fields's 
time lost in numberless periodicals. As a sincere lover of 
letters, then, and a publisher of unusual tact and skill, Fields, 
during the years between 1840 and 1870, afforded to the 
literary men of New England a rare opportunity. One and 
all had constantly near by a skilful publisher, who was at the 
same time a wise counsellor, a warm personal friend, and an 
ardent admirer. The stimulus to hterary production afforded 
by such a patron of letters can hardly be estimated. 

Though Fields was not the originator of the " Atlantic 
Monthly," he was for years its publisher and for some time 
its editor. He was not the originator, either, of a little society 
of which he was an early and enthusiastic member. This 
was the Saturday Club, which grew spontaneously into exist- 
ence sometime about 1857, assembling at occasional dinners 
the principal literary personages of the day. Emerson was a 
member ; so were Motley, Holmes, Longfellow, Agassiz, and 
many more. The club, which survives, is too private for 
detailed mention. As New England literature has faded, too, 
the club, though still distinguished in membership, is no longer 
a centre of literary creation. Very lately, however, a man 
familiar with the social history of Boston declared that in their 



THE ''ATLANTIC MONTHLY" 377 

own day the standard writers of New England were more con- 
cerned as to what the Saturday Club might think of their 
productions than they ever deigned to be about the public. 

Such facts, of course, are indefinite. How far the opinion 
of the Saturday Club really affected the literature of its palm- 
iest days may still be debatable; and so, indeed, may the 
question of how far the personality of Fields, at once an en- 
thusiastic member of the club, the most successful of New 
England publishers, and the editor of the " Atlantic," was 
vitally stimulating. Surely, though, as one begins to see in 
perspective a period which is passing into history, the im- 
portance of these influences seems rather to grow than to 
lessen. At least, it was when these were at their strongest 
that much of the best New England literature was made and 
came to light. Some of its makers we have already consid- 
ered. Four, however, more unreservedly devoted to letters 
than the rest, remain for us. These are Longfellow, Lowell, 
Holmes, and Hawthorne. 



XI 

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 

Among the men of letters who in mature life gathered about 
the " Atlantic Monthly " the most popular was Henry Wads- 
worth Longfellow. He was born in 1807 at Portland, Maine, 
where his father was a lawyer. At the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century the profession of the bar involved in New 
England a personal eminence similar to that which in colonial 
times had been held there by the clergy. Though a lawyer 
might not be rich, he was locally conspicuous, much as rich 
men have been since the Civil War; and, furthermore, his 
professional position usually implied what mere wealth has 
never yet implied among native Yankees, — that in private 
life he enjoyed a certain social distinction. A little earlier 
than Longfellow's time, the son of a lawyer would have found 
himself socially somewhat below the son of a divine ; later the 
bar has had no more social distinction than other respectable 
callings. As the son of a lawyer in the palmiest days of the 
New England bar, then, Longfellow was fortunate in birth ; 
and although his life was at times clouded by deep personal 
sorrows, its external circumstances seem throughout as for- 
tunate as human ones can be. 

In boyhood he showed delight in poetry ; he early wrote 
verses, by no means remarkable, for the local papers of Port- 
land. At fifteen he went to Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, 
Maine, where he took his degree in 1825. At that time 
there happened to be at Bowdoin more students who were 
subsequently distinguished than have ever been there since. 
Among them were J. S. C. Abbott, the historian, Franklin 
Pierce, who finally became President of the United States, and 



LONGFELLOW 379 

Nathaniel Hawthorne. These college years, too, were those 
when the spirit of Renaissance was freshest in New England 
air. Channing's great sermon on Unitarianism had been 
preached in 18 19; Emerson's sermon on the sacrament, 
which marks the beginning of transcendental disintegration, 
was not preached until 1832. Longfellow's youth, in brief, 
came just when the reHgious and philosophic buoyancy of the 
New England Renaissance was surging ; and this affected him 
all the more because in a region and at a college where old- 
fashioned orthodoxy still prevailed, he was from the beginning 
a Unitarian. Surrounded by fellow-students of marked ability, 
he found himself in a somewhat militant position, as a cham- 
pion amid Calvinistic traditions of a philosophy which held 
human nature essentially good. 

At that very moment, another phase of Renaissance was 
strongly asserting itself not far away. Harvard College had 
awakened to the existence of a wider range of culture than 
was comprised in the ancestral traditions of the ancient classics. 
In 18 16, the Smith professorship of the French and Spanish 
languages was founded there. In 181 7, George Ticknor, 
fresh from his then rare European experience, became the 
first Smith professor. He filled the chair until 1835; and 
in those sixteen years he may be said to have established the 
serious study of modern languages in America. When his 
teaching began, an educated American was expected to be 
familiar with no later masters of literature than the Romans. 
It is to the influences which Ticknor first embodied that we 
owe the traditional familiarity of educated Americans with 
such names as Dante, Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, and 
Goethe. Nothing marks the spirit of our Renaissance more 
profoundly than this epoch-making recognition of the dignity 
and value of everything which is truly literature. 

When Longfellow graduated from Bowdoin at the age of 
nineteen, Ticknor's teaching, then in its seventh year, had 
made such general impression that the authorities of Bowdoin 



38o THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

began to desire something similar there. The intention ot 
Longfellow's father had been that his son should study for the 
bar; and the boy, who had hardly ever been out of Maine, 
had no more obvious qualification for a professorship of mod- 
ern languages than the fact that he had been a good scholar 
in an old-fashioned classical college. His enthusiastic love 
for literature, however, was soon recognised as what the godly 
would call a vocation; in 1826 he went abroad under an 
agreement to prepare himself, by a three years' study of mod- 
ern languages, for a Bowdoin professorship which should 
resemble Ticknor's at Harvard. Like some old pilgrim to 
Christian Rome, he set forth, wonderingly ignorant of the 
truths which he thus proposed apostolically to proclaim. In 
1829 he came home with a reading knowledge of Spanish, 
Italian, French, and German, and began to teach at Bowdoin. 
In this work he persisted for six years. In 1835, Ticknor 
grew tired of his professorship, and chancing to possess for- 
tune decided to give up teaching. The question of his suc- 
cessor having presented itself, Ticknor discerned no man in 
America better qualified to follow him than Longfellow. He 
recommended Longfellow to the Corporation of Harvard ; and 
Longfellow, who up to that time had had little personal rela- 
tion with Cambridge, accepted the Smith professorship. To 
prepare himself for this wider field of work, he went abroad 
for a year more. In 1836 he began his teaching at Harvard, 
which continued for eighteen years. 

Longfellow's temper, like Ticknor's, proved increasingly 
impatient of distracting academic routine. As must always 
be the case with men of literary ambition, he felt more and 
more how gravely the drudgery of teaching must interfere with 
work which time may well prove more lasting and significant. 
His constant, enthusiastic wish was to be a poet. In 1854, 
then, he resigned the professorship in turn. The next year 
it was given to James Russell Lowell, who held it, at least 
'n title, until his death in 189 1. 



LONGFELLOW 381 

Since then the Smith professorship has remained vacant. 
When it may again be filled is uncertain ; but one thing seems 
sure. For seventy-five years it had only three tenants, — 
George Ticknor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James 
Russell Lowell. When Ticknor began his work modern 
literature was virtually unknown to America ; when Lowell 
died, modern literature was as familiar to this whole continent 
as ever were the classics. Meanwhile almost all the literature 
which our continent has yet produced, and certainly all the 
memorable literature of New England, had come into exist- 
ence. In the literary history of New England no three names 
are more honourable than those of the three Smith professors. 
Nor is it invidious to add that there is no living man of 
letters in America who could be invited to the Smith pro- 
fessorship with any hope of increasing or even of maintaining 
its established personal distinction. 

Up to 1854, Longfellow, although already popular as a 
poet, remained professionally a college professor of a new and 
radical subject ; his business was to introduce into the mental 
and spiritual life of Harvard students that range of thought 
and feeling which since classical times has been gathering its 
records in Europe. Though he always loved his subject, he 
hated the use which his professional circumstances compelled 
him to make of it. The instinct which made him recoil from 
the drudgery of teaching was sound. He is remembered as 
a faithful teacher; but anybody can teach faithfully, and no 
faithfulness can make Yankee students very eager pupils. 
Longfellow's true mission was not to struggle with unwilling 
hearers ; it was rather to set forth in words which should find 
their way to the eager readers of a continent the spirit as dis- 
tinguished from the letter of the literatures with which as a 
professor he conscientiously dealt so long. 

From 1854 to the end, Longfellow lived as a professional 
author in that fine old Cambridge house which before his time 
was conspicuous as the deserted mansion of some Tories exiled 



382 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

by the Revolution, and which is now consecrated as the home 
of the most widely popular and beloved American poet. Long 
before he died, in 1882, his reputation as a man of letters 
had so far transcended any other aspect of his work that 
people had almost forgotten how he had once been a college 
teacher. 

For this forgetfulness there is plenty of reason. Though 
throughout Longfellow's professorship he had felt its duties 
seriously to prevent literary labour, he had produced during his 
incumbency much of his most familiar verse. His " Voices 
of the Night" appeared in 1839, his " Evangeline" in 1847, 
and his "Golden Legend" in 1851. Already, then, before 
he laid his professorship down, there were hundreds who knew 
him as a poet for every one who knew him as a college 
teacher. In point of fact, too, the work which he did during 
the twenty-seven years of his purely literary life hardly ex- 
tended, although it certainly maintained, the reputation as a 
poet which he had already established during his twenty-five 
years of teaching. To understand his real character as a 
poet, however, we must constantly keep in mind that other 
profession of teacher which he so faithfully practised for a full 
third of his life. 

The subjects which Longfellow taught now have a familiar 
place in every respectable institution of the higher learning 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In his time, they resembled 
some new discovered contment, where whole realms of country 
are still unvisited by man. To Longfellow, accordingly, the 
true business of his professorship seemed like that of an en- 
thusiastic explorer. The languages which he learned so eagerly 
never seemed to him deserving of lifelong study for themselves ; 
they were merely vehicles of expression which carried him into 
new and wonderful worlds of beautiful old humanity. These 
vehicles were to be cared for so far as they are efficient ; 
they were to be loved so far as in beautiful form they convey 
to us thoughts intrinsically beautiful and noble; but they were 



LONGFELLOW 383 

at best vehicles whose use was to lead him into inexhaustible 
regions of humanity, unknown except by vague tradition to 
his countrymen who had gone before him. 

In his love for literature thus considered, Longfellow never 
wavered. What vexed him throughout the years of his teach- 
ing was not the matter with which he dealt ; it was rather 
that he shrank from imparting literature to unwilling pupils, 
that he longed to saturate himself with it and to express 
unfettered the sentiments which it unfailingly stirred within 
him. These sentiments, which he uttered in a manner so 
welcome to all America, seemed to him as spontaneous 
as ever inspiration seemed to poets who have heard the true 
whisper of the Muse. Yet one who now studies his work can 
hardly help feeling that even though he never suspected the 
fact, his temper as a man of letters was almost as academic as 
was the profession to which he reluctantly devoted year after 
year of his maturity. 

The task of universities is to deal not so much with actual 
life as with the records of it. From eldest time human 
beings have left traces of what their earthly experience has 
meant. In efforts to preserve, to understand, to elucidate 
these traces of the vanished past and vanished men, scholars 
exhaust energy enough for any human lifetimes. They are 
bound, then, to drift away from actuality. Their lives are 
employed, and importantly, in gleaning from books material 
which shall engender the scholarship and the books of the 
future. Now, Longfellow's temper, even as a teacher, was 
that of a man of letters ; he felt constantly stirred to what he 
believed original expression, and he was never content unless 
he was phrasing as well as he could the emotions which arose 
within him amid all the drudgery of work. But if in this 
aspect Longfellow was a genuine man of letters, he was all 
the while an academic scholar ; for the influence which stirred 
him most was not what he experienced, but rather what he 
read. From beginning to end he was inspired chiefly, if not 



384 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

wholly, by noble and beautiful records of facts long since dead 
and gone. 

Though this limitation marks Longfellow apart from those 
great poets who have immortally expressed the meaning of 
actual life, it had at once the grace of sincerity, and the added 
grace of that natural gift which was perhaps Longfellow's 
most salient. His taste was unerring. Wherever he met the 
beauties of literature he delighted in them with inexhaustible 
zest; and in his instinctive feelings about literature there was 
something very like the guileless confidence in human nature 
which inspired the Unitarians and the Transcendentalists. 
For a little while the national inexperience of New England 
had so freed it from the vileness of dense humanity that in 
religion, in philosophy, in morals, the most earnest minds 
could honestly believe uppermost in mankind those traits 
which are best. In the literatures which Longfellow loved 
we can to-day see endless depths of baseness ; and to-day we 
know these literatures so well that we can hardly neglect such 
shadows. To Longfellow, on the other hand, these whole 
regions of aesthetic delight were so fresh that he could delight 
in their beauties, which he perceived with such instant tact, 
and could honestly be blind to everything not beautiful or 
noble. His mood resembled that of some simple American 
boy who with all the innocence of our native youth is sud- 
denly brought face to face with the splendours of European 
civilisation. Such a boy overwhelmingly feels the beauties 
which survive from an illimitable past. The evil and the 
turmoil of the days which produced the sculpture of Greece, 
or the painting of Italy, or the architecture of Gothic Europe, 
are dead and gone. To discover them nowadays demands 
the scrutiny of a scientific scholarship for which an untutored 
American boy is still immature. Intoxicated with delight in 
the beauty which old humanity has wrought, he is not even 
aware that about him grovels a social corruption baser than 
his native inexperience has ever dreamed on. From dreams 



LONGFELLOW 385 

like these there must generally be awakening, nor can there 
be much more tragic awakening than that which comes to 
such a boy when he begins to perceive all the evil so inextri- 
cably intermingled with the beauty which once he thought so 
pure. But Longfellow had the rare happiness to be a lifelong 
dreamer. He lived at a moment of such national youth that 
throughout his seventy-five years he never knew the maturity 
which disenchants our later time. 

The impression which he made on his first readers has 
never been better phrased than by Mr. Stedman : — 

" A new generation may be at a loss to conceive the effect of Long- 
fellow's work when it first began to appear. I may convey something 
of this by what is at once a memory and an illustration. Take the 
case of a child whose Sunday outlook was restricted, in a decaying 
Puritan village, to a wooden meeting-house of the old Congregational 
type. The interior — plain, colourless, rigid with dull white pews and 
dismal galleries — increased the spiritual starvation of a young nature 
unconsciously longing for colour and variety. Many a child like this 
one, on a first holiday visit to the town, seeing the vine-grown walls, 
the roofs and arches, of a graceful Gothic church, has felt a sense of 
something rich and strange ; and many, now no longer children, can 
remember that the impression upon entrance was such as the stateli- 
est cathedral could not renew. The columns and tinted walls, the 
ceiling of oak and blue, the windows of gules and azure and gold, — 
the service, moreover, with its chant and organ-roll, — all this enrap- 
tured and possessed them. To the one relief hitherto afforded them, 
that of nature's picturesqueness, — which even Calvinism endured 
without compunction, — was added a new joy, a glimpse of the beauty 
and sanctity of human art. A similar delight awaited the first readers 
of Longfellow's prose and verse. Here was a painter and a romancer 
indeed, who had journeyed far and returned w^ith gifts for all at home, 
and who promised often and again to 

' sing a more wonderful song 
Or tell a more marvellous tale.' " 

The hold which Longfellow thus took on enthusiastic 
American youth he soon took on the whole reading public 
of our country. His popularity is evident in our general 
familiarity with the creatures of his fancy. The village 
blacksmith, the youth who bears 'mid snow and ice a banner 

25 



386 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

with the strange device Excelsior, the skipper wrecked on the 
reef of Norman's Woe, Evangeline, Hiawatha, Miles Stand- 
ish, John Alden, Priscilla the Puritan maiden, and even Paul 
Revere, — figures and names which but for Longfellow would 
hardly have been known, — he has made us apt to group with 
Bible patriarchs or the world-old heroes of antiquity. Such 
popularity almost implies a weakness. Profundity of substance, 
or excellence of form, rarely touches the masses ; and Long- 
fellow's very popularity resulted long ago in a reaction against 
him among the fastidious. This never affected the serenity 
of his temper; and, indeed, amid the sincere adulation which 
was constantly brought to his feet during his last years 
at Cambridge, he may very possibly not have remarked that 
his admirers were apt to be less and less educated. Even in 
early days, however, when his popularity had only just -trans- 
pired, the admiration which his work excited was clouded by 
occasional dissent. Margaret Fuller, for example, conscien- 
tiously devoted to the extravagance of Transcendental phil- 
osophy, found Longfellow shallow, and said so. Poe, as far 
from academic a personage as if he had been incontestably 
a great one, utterly misunderstood the academic character of 
Longfellow's mind, and accused him of plagiarism. And 
there was more such criticism. 

For this there was ground. Longfellow never wrote any- 
thing more deeply sincere than the " Psalm of Life," which 
remains perhaps the most widely popular of his lyrics. " I 
kept it," he said, " some time in manuscript, unwilling to show 
it to any one, it being a voice from my inmost heart, at a 
time when I was rallying from depression." From the day, 
more than fifty years ago, when it first saw light in the 
" Knickerbocker Magazine," it has spoken, as it will speak 
for generations more, to the hearts of simple-minded men. Its 
deepest merit, however, lies in a gentle simplicity which un- 
sympathetic moods must be at pains to distinguish from com- 
place. Even of its most familiar stanza. 



LONGFELLOW 387 

, " Life is real ! Life is earnest ! 

And the grave is not its goal ; 

Dust thou art, to dust returnest, 

Was not spoken of the soul," 

one may well question whether the deeper trait is utter simpli- 
city or reminiscent triteness. And the whole poem is full not 
only of outworn metaphor, but of superficial literary allusion : 
" Art is long, and Time is fleeting," for example ; the " foot- 
prints on the sands of time," which so queerly mix up the 
beach of Robinson Crusoe with the unimpressionable contents 
of hour-glasses ; and, still more, the closing line, 

" Learn to labour and to wait," 

which so elusively misses the solemnity of that graver line, 

" They also serve who only stand and wait," — 

the mournful close of Milton's great sonnet on his Blindness. 
Yet when all is said, a sense of the sweet sincerity which 
makes these commonplaces more dear than richer wisdom 
comes surging back. 

Again, Longfellow, a lifelong friend of Charles Sumner, 
always sympathised with the antislavery movement ; and in 
1842 he published some poems in its behalf. Here are a few 
verses from one of them : — 

" Beside the ungathered rice he lay, 

His sickle in his hand ; 
His breast was bare, his matted hair 

Was buried in the sand. 
Again, in the mist and shadow of sleep. 

He saw his native land. 

"Wide through the landscape of his dreams 

The lordly Niger flowed ; 
Beneath the palm-trees on the plain 

Once more a king he strode ; 
And heard the tinkling caravans 

Descend the mountain road. 



388 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

" He saw once more his dark-eyed queen 
Among her children stand ; 
They clasped his neck, tliey kissed his cheeks, 

They held him by the hand ! — 
A tear burst from the sleeper's lids 
And fell into the sand. 

" The forests, with their myriad tongues, 
Shouted of liberty ; 
And the Blast of the Desert cried aloud. 

With a voice so wild and free, 
That he started in his sleep and smiled 
At their tempestuous glee. 

"He did not feel the driver's whip, 

Nor the burning heat of day ; 
For death had illumined the Land of Sleep, 

And his lifeless body lay 
A worn-out fetter, that the soul 

Had broken and thrown away." 

This, of course, came ten years before " Uncle Tom's 
Cabin," for which fact all allowance must be made ; but duly 
making it, one may fairly doubt whether in all antislavery 
literature there is a more humorous example of the way in 
which philanthropic dreamers often constructed negroes by 
the simple process of daubing their own faces with burnt cork. 
Compare with this a few phrases from a poem of Whittier's, 
written at about the same time, and based on the fact that an 
auctioneer recommended a female slave as a good Christian : — 

" A Christian ! going, gone ! 
Who bids for God's own image ? for His grace. 
Which that poor victim of the market-place 
Hath in her suffering won ? 

" My God ! can such things be ? 
Hast Thou not said that whatsoe'er is done 
Unto Thy weakest and Thy humblest one 
Is even done to Thee ? 

"Oh, from the fields of cane, 
From the low rice-swamp, from the trader's cell ; 
From the black slave-ship's foul and loathsome hell, 
And coffle's weary chain ; 



LONGFELLOW 389 

" Hoarse, horrible, and strong, 
Rises to Heaven that agonising cry, 
Filling the arches of the hollow sky, 

How long, O God, how long ? " 

One poem is as honest as the other ; but by the side of 
Whittier's passion, one feels more strongly than ever the 
academic deliberation of Longfellow's em'otion. 

This trait, evident throughout his work, is nowhere more 
palpable than in that familiar " Tale of a Wayside Inn " 
which has made Paul Revere a national hero. In the middle 
of this ballad, Longfellow describes Revere, waiting beyond 
the Charles River for a signal which was to be shown from 
the steeple of a Boston church : — 

" Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride, 
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride 
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere. 
Now he patted his horse's side. 
Now gazed at the landscape far and near, 
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth, 
And turned and tightened his saddle girth ; 
But mostly he watched with eager search 
The belfry tower of the Old North Church, 
As it rose above the graves on the hill, 
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still. 
And lo ! as he looks, on the belfry's height 
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light ! 
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns, 
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight 
A second lamp in the belfry burns ! " 

At a distance of some two miles from the belfry in ques- 
tion, Revere first sees, as would naturally be the case, a gleam 
of light from it ; but immediately afterwards he detects there, 
at this same distance, a second lamp. No single word could 
more unconsciously confess how Longfellow failed to visualise 
the situation. Compare with this any bit of excellent descrip- 
tive verse, such, for example, as the approach of the boats in 
the " Lady of the Lake," and you will feel the difference be- 



390 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

tween creative work and work which is fundamentally aca- 
demic. 

But this is more than enough of Longfellow's faults and 
limitations. He has passed from us too lately to permit us 
to dwell upon the singular serenity and beauty of his personal 
life and character. No one can read its records or remember 
anything of its facts without feeling the rare quality of a 
nature which throughout a lifetime could persist unspoiled by 
prosperity and unbroken by poignant personal sorrows. To 
be sure, he was never passionate; neither in his life nor in his 
verse does he ever seem to have been swept away by feeling. 
On the other hand, as we have seen, his taste was unerring, 
and his sentiment gently sympathetic. His real office was to 
open the flood-gates of that modern literature in whose flash- 
ing beauty he delighted, and whose murky depths he never 
quite suspected. And if the verse in which he set forth his 
delight be hardly of the kind which enriches world-literature, 
its lucidity of phrase and its delicacy of rhythm combine to 
give it a sentimental beauty which must long endear it to those 
who love simplicity of heart. 

Thereby, after all, Longfellow comes very near a world- 
old definition of literary greatness, which has sometimes been 
held the virtue of those who think the thoughts of the wise 
and who speak the language of the simple. It may be that 
he knew few wise thoughts which were all his own ; but he 
so truly loved the wisdom and the beauty of those elder litera- 
tures which he was the first of Americans fully to recognise, 
that he absorbed in a way of his own the wisdom which the 
good and the great of the past had gleaned from experience. 
At first, to be sure, it may seem that those considerable parts 
of his work which deal with our native country are of another 
stripe. More and more, however, one grows to feel that, 
despite the subjects, these are not indigenous in sentiment. 
Rather, for the first time, they illuminate our American past 
with a glow of conventional romance. So by and by we find 



LONGFELLOW 391 

that our gently academic poet has just been thinking about 
New England in such moods as he loved in countless old-world 
poets who early and late recorded the historic romance of 
Europe. Yet Longfellow does not seem to have been con- 
sciously imitative. He sincerely believed that he was making 
spontaneous American poetry. Whatever his lack of passion 
or imagination, he was never false to himself. Whether he 
ever understood his mission it is hard to say ; but what that 
mission was is clear j and so is the truth that he was a faithful 
missionary. Never relaxing his effort to express in beautiful 
language meanings which he truly believed beautiful, he 
revealed to the untutored new world the romantic beauty of 
the old. 

Very lately, to be sure, an American man of letters, who has 
the happiness personally to remember our elder days, has said 
that great injustice is now done Bryant, by neglecting the in- 
fluence of his translations from the Spanish. To many, it is 
said, these afforded a first, fascinating glimpse into the world 
of romance. Historically, then, Bryant may perhaps be held 
to have pointed out the way which Longfellow so faithfully 
followed. Certainly, however, Bryant's translations are no 
longer generally familiar ; and Longfellow's still speak, as they 
spoke from the beginning, to the hearts of the people. Leader 
or follower, Longfellow worthily remains the most popular 
poet of his country. 

In 1880 he wrote for " Ultima Thule," the last volume 
which he published, a final poem, entitled *' The Poet and his 
Songs " : — 

" As the birds come in Spring, 
We know not from where ; 
As the stars come at evening 
From depths of the air ; 

"As the rain comes from the cloud 
And the brook from the ground ; 
As suddenly, low or loud. 
Out of silence a sound ; 



392 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

" As the grape comes to the vine, 
The fruit to the tree; 
As the wind comes to the pine, 
And the tide to the sea ; 

"As come the white sails of ships 
O'er the ocean's verge ; 
As comes the smile to the lips, 
The foam to the surge ; 

" So come to the Poet his songs, 
All hitherward blown 
From the misty realm, that belongs 
To the vast unknown. 

" His, and not his, are the lays 
He sings ; and their fame 
Is his, and not his ; and the praise 
And the pride of a name. 

" For voices pursue him by day 
And haunt him by night, 
And he listens and needs must obey, 
When the Angel says : ' Write ! ' " 

Few men ever phrased more sweetly what seemed to them 
the deepest facts of their artistic lives. In the gentleness of 
this phrasing, as well as in the triteness of this imagery, there 
is something which tells at once of Longfellow's limitations 
and of his power. Thinking the thoughts of the wise, without 
suspicion that the wisdom was not always quite his own ; 
speaking the language of the simple, with no consciousness of 
the commonplaces which lurk so near simplicity, — he be- 
lieved till the end that to him the Angel had said "Write ! " 
To him this injunction seemed as divine as any that Muse 
ever spoke to singer of pristine Greece, or that the inspiration 
of the Holy Spirit ever breathed into the heart of Hebrev - 
prophet. The man would be bold who should reflectively say 
to-day that this pure, true life and work, lived and done by 
the most popular poet of our Renaissance, is not, after all, as 
admirable as many which our later moods of criticism have 
been apt to think greater. 



XII 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

In 1854 Longfellow resigned the Smith professorship at Har- 
vard College. The next year James Russell Lowell was ap- 
pointed his successor. Up to this time Lowell's career, 
though more limited than Longfellow's, had been similar. 
Sprung from a family already distinguished, which throughout 
the nineteenth century has displayed high quality both in private 
and in civic life, he was born at Cambridge in 1819, the son 
of a Unitarian minister, whose church was in Boston. He 
grew up in Cambridge. In 1838 he took his degree at Har- 
vard ; he studied law ; but he found this profession distasteful, 
and his true interest was in letters. For fifteen years before 
his appointment to the Smith professorship, then, he had been 
professionally a literary man. From this time on, for a full 
twenty-two years, his ostensible profession became what Long- 
fellow's had been from 1836 to 1854, and Ticknor's from 
1817 to 1835, — the teaching of modern languages and litera- 
ture to Harvard undergraduates. 

The different tasks to which the successive Smith professors 
addressed themselves might once have seemed a question of 
different personalities ; to-day, however, they seem rather a 
question of developing American culture. When Ticknor's 
work began, the names of Dante and Cervantes were hardly 
more familiar in America than that of the Japanese painter 
Hokusai is to-day. Ticknor's business, then, was to intro- 
duce to New England a fresh range of learning ; and accord- 
ingly his most characteristic publication was the comprehensive, 
accurately unimaginative " History of Spanish Literature." 
When, after twenty years, Longfellow succeeded him, Amer - 



394 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

ica knew modern literature by name, but, except perhaps 
for Bryant's translations, hardly more. Could anything 
have alleviated the drudgery of teaching, then, for a tem- 
perament always yearning to create, it would have been 
such a task as thus became Longfellow's. In brief, this was 
to make pupils enjoy excursions into that limitless world of 
modern literature which for America was still newly discov- 
ered. In 1855, when Lowell came to his work, the condi- 
tions had altered again. The main facts of modern literature 
had become almost classically familiar; and the influences 
which had expressed themselves in the various phases of New 
England Renaissance had greatly stimulated excellent general 
reading. To the generation with which Lowell came to his 
maturity, then, the great modern masters — Spenser and 
Shakspere, Dante and Cervantes and Goethe — were as 
freshly delightful as the old Greeks had been to the culture 
of fifteenth-century Italy. They were not yet stale. But 
scholarship cannot stagnate ; modern literature had been dis- 
covered, it had been enthusiastically explored, and now came 
the task of understanding it. So as a college teacher, and as 
a critical writer too, Lowell's professional task proved 
interpretative. 

The way in which he addressed himself to this task, and 
the ends he accomplished, were humorously illustrated not 
long ago when two Harvard men chanced to meet, who 
had been pupils of Lowell twenty-five years before. One 
happened to have in his hand a copy of the " Song of Ro- 
land." His friend, glancing at it, was reminded of the old 
times and said rather enthusiastically : " How Lowell used to 
give us the spirit of that ! " — " Yes," replied the other, who is 
an eminent philologist, " and that was all he gave us." In 
which emphatic little adjective is implied the phase which 
the study of modern literature has now assumed. This range 
of human expression has been discovered, it has been enjoyed, 
an attempt has been made to understand its spirit, and now, if 



LOWELL 395 

we are to keep pace with scholarship, we must pitilessly ana- 
lyse its every detail. 

Yet, though Lowell was not a severe modern scholar, he by 
no means neglected severe learning. A pupil who inquired 
about the minute works which were already beginning to in- 
terpose themselves between modern literature and human 
beings, was apt to find that Lowell had glanced through them 
and knew something of their merits. His sentiments about 
them, however, resembled Emerson's about the Lord's Supper ; 
on the whole they did not interest him ; and he always held that 
until you were interested in literature, you could not under- 
stand it. The task he set himself as a teacher, then, was to 
excite in his pupils intelligent interest in the texts with which 
he was dealing. This task he found as irksome as Ticknor or 
Longfellow had found theirs. In Lowell's teaching days the 
Renaissance of New England was beginning to fade ; under- 
graduates were less and less apt to delight in poetry ; and the 
very traits which prevented Lowell from generally appealing to 
the reading public prevented him too from generally appealing 
to Harvard students. On pupils whom he really touched, all 
the while, his influence was probably- as strong as any exerted 
by a Harvard teacher of his time. How conscientiously he 
did his task will be clear to any Harvard man whose memory 
runs back five and twenty years. 

In 1875 Longfellow and Lowell were both living in Cam- 
bridge j and though Longfellow was growing old, both men 
seemed still in their prime. To Harvard students, then, both 
names were generally familiar. Longfellow they knew to be 
the most popular poet in America, so popular indeed that 
clever undergraduates, despising Philistine favourites, inclined 
to dismiss him as commonplace. Yet even these complacent 
critics could not be insensible to the singular beauty and dignity 
of Longfellow's presence, then daily familiar in Cambridge 
streets ; and some of them were dimly aware that in a remote 
past this Olympian old man of letters had for a while been a 



396 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

Harvard professor. With Lowell the case was almost pre- 
cisely the reverse. His figure was less often visible ; hun- 
dreds of men went through college without knowing him 
by sight, but almost everybody knew that he was regularly 
teaching French and Italian and Spanish. They knew too 
that this not very popular college teacher had literary repu- 
tation. They had heard of the " Vision of Sir Launfal " 
and the " Biglow Papers." These, however, belonged to a 
past as remote as Longfellow's professorship ; and what 
Lowell had written since, they did not trouble themselves to 
inquire. To them Longfellow was a poet who had once been 
a professor; Lowell was a professor who had once written 
poetry. The eminence which finally made him a national 
worthy came from the social accomplishment with which 
from 1877 to 1885 he filled the office of United States min- 
ister, first to Spain and later to England. 

This fact that Lowell's eminence came late in life is char- 
acteristic. Throughout his career, as man of letters and as 
teacher alike, he had been at once helped and hindered by 
peculiarities of temperament conquerable only by the full ex- 
perience of a slow maturity. Born and brought up in Cam- 
bridge, when Cambridge was still a Middlesex village, he was 
familiar with the now vanished country folk of old New Eng- 
land. From youth he was passionately fond of general read- 
ing, in days when this led no Yankee away from sound 
literature. Though impatient of minute scholarship, too, he 
possessed one of the most important traits of a minute scholar: 
by nature he was aware of • detail in every impression, 
and careful of it in every expression. What truly interested 
him, to be sure, in life and in books alike, were the traits 
which make books and life most broadly human ; nor did any 
one ever feel more deeply that, for all its paradoxical incon- 
gruities, humanity is finally a unit. In his effort to under- 
stand humanity, however, he was incessantly hampered by his 
constitutional sense of detail. The data of life, for one thing. 



LOWELL 397 

come to us in two distinct ways : the past is at rest in books j 
the present is throbbing all about us. To understand either we 
must keep the other in mind ; we must illustrate books by ex- 
perience, and to correct the errors of experience we must re- 
treat and observe them from regions to which only books can 
take us. Again, there are aspects in which both books and 
life seem profoundly serious ; yet there are other aspects in 
which even the most serious phases of both seem whimsically 
absurd. And truly to understand the complex unity of 
humanity you must somehow fuse all these, — life and books, 
sublimity and humour, light and twilight and shadow. 

The fact that Lowell was constantly sensitive to incom- 
patible impressions was not his only temperamental obstacle. 
The well-known circumstance that he was amateurishly unable 
satisfactorily to revise his writing indicates how completely he 
was possessed by each of his various moods, which often 
chased one another in bewildering confusion, yet again left 
him for prolonged intervals in what seemed to him states of 
hopeless stagnation. Throughout all this uncertainty, how- 
ever, one can feel in his literary temper two constant, an- 
tagonistic phases. His purity of taste was quite equal to 
Longfellow's ; particularly as he grew older, he eagerly de- 
lighted in those phases of literature which are excellent. Yet 
all the while he was incessantly impelled to whimsical extrava- 
gance of thought, feeling, and utterance. Whoever knew 
him as a teacher, then, must often have found him disconcert- 
ing. At one moment his comment on the text would be full of 
sympathetic insight ; at the next, as likely as not, he would 
make an atrocious pun ; and he would take a boyishly perverse 
delight in watching the effect on his pupils of his spontaneous 
incongruities. The trait appears in his fondness for cramming 
his published essays with obscure allusions to unheard of 
oddities in the byways of literature and history. If one took 
these seriously, they would be abominably pedantic ; who 
under the sun, for example, was Abraham a Sancta Clara 



398 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

whom Lowell dragged into that opening passage of his essay 
on Thoreau ? In fact, however, this mannerism was only a 
rather juvenile prank. Life puzzled Lowell, and in revenge 
Lowell amused himself by puzzling the people he talked to or 
wrote for. It is no wonder that this paradoxical conflict be- 
tween purity of taste and mischievous extravagance of temper 
retarded his maturity until he had grown to the ripeness of 
nearly sixty years. 

His impulsively volatile temperament, again, involved some- 
what unusual sensitiveness to the influences which from time 
to time surrounded him. Early in life he married a woman 
remarkable alike for charms and for gifts, who was enthusias- 
tically devoted to the reforms then in the air. It was partly 
due to her influence, apparently, that Lowell for a while 
proved so hot-headed a reformer. After her premature death 
this phase of his temper became less evident. It was revived, 
of course, by the passionate days of Civil War, when he 
upheld extreme Northern sentiments with all his might ; and 
the depth of his experience finally resulted in that " Commem- 
oration Ode " at Harvard which chiefly entitles him to con- 
sideration as a serious poet. Yet this ode itself, though said to 
have been quickly written and little revised, is marked rather 
by exceptionally sustained seriousness of feeling than by any- 
thing which seems simply, sensuously passionate. One of 
the traits for which you must search Lowell's volumes long 
is lyrical spontaneity. An extravagant contemporary critic 
once declared in conversation that he had no more afflatus 
than a tortoise. In this extravagance there is a touch of truth, 
but only a touch. The real Lowell was a man of deep, but 
constantly various and whimsically incongruous, emotional 
nature, whose impulse to expression was constantly hampered 
by all manner of importunate external impressions. 

For all this, the chances are that, like Longfellow, Lowell 
would have been apt to consider himself most seriously as a 
poet; and work classed among his poems most clearly ex- 



LOWELL 399 

presses his individuality. His first volume of verse appeared 
in 1 84 1, three years after his graduation, and in 1844 ^^^'i 
1848 he published other such volumes. In these there is 
nothing particularly characteristic. Honest, careful, sincere 
enough, the work seems ; but except for the eminence finally 
attained by its author little of it would attract attention to-day. 
This kind of thing reached its acme in the " Vision of Sir 
Launfal," published in 1848. The familiar stanza from the 
prelude to Part I. is typical of the whole : — 

" And what is so rare as a day in June ? 

Then, if ever come perfect days; 
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune, 

And over it softly her warm ear lays ; 
Whether we look or whether we listen, 

We hear life murmur, or see it glisten ; 
Every clod feels a stir of might, 

An instinct within it that reaches and towers, 
And groping blindly above it for light, 

Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers ; 
The flush of life may well be seen 

Thrilling back over hills and valleys ; 
The cowslip startles in meadows green, 

The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice. 
And there 's never a leaf nor a blade too mean 

To be some happy creature's palace ; 
The little bird sits at his door in the sun, 

Atilt like a blossom among the leaves. 
And lets his illumined being o'errun 

With the deluge of summer that it receives; 
His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings. 

And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings ; 
He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest, — 

In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best ? " 



Here is a man who has read a great deal of poetry, and who 
is thus impelled to write. Somewhat in the mood of Words- 
worth — to whom three stanzas before he has alluded — he 
tries to express the impression made upon him by nature. He 
succeeds only in making nature seem a pretty phase of litera- 



400 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

ture. It is all very serious, no doubt, and sweet in purpose ; 
but it is never spontaneously lyric. 

The " Vision of Sir Launfal " was published in 1848. In 
that same year came two other publications which show a very 
different Lowell ; one is the " Fable for Critics," the other the 
first collection of the " Biglow Papers," which had begun to 
appear in the Boston " Courier " two years earlier. In a 
study like ours, the " Fable for Critics," of which we have 
already had a taste or two, is a useful document. Ten years 
out of college and already a professional writer, alertly alive 
to the contemporary condition of American letters, Lowell at 
last permitted himself to write about them, under a thin dis- 
guise of anonymity, with unrestricted freedom. The result 
is queer. It now seems wonderful that any human being 
could ever have had patience to read the poem through. 
The fable, so far as there is any, proves as commonplace as 
the " Vision of Sir Launfal ; " and, besides, it is bewilder- 
ingly lost in such amateurishly extravagant whimsicality and 
pedantry as hampered Lowell all his life. At the same 
time, his portraits of contemporary American writers, in 
many cases made long before their best work was done, are 
marked not only by a serious critical spirit, but by acute 
Yankee good sense, and by surprising felicity of idiomatic 
phrase. The people he touches on are flung together pell- 
mell, amid allusions which would have taxed the ingenuity of 
Burton, and rhymes which would have put Samuel Butler to 
the blush, and puns which half rekindle the Calvinistic embers 
of eternal punishment. Over-minuteness never more tediously 
defeated its probable intention of amusing. Yet, to go no 
further, you can rarely find more suggestive criticism any- 
where than what the " Fable for Critics " says of Emerson, 
Theodore Parker, Bryant, Whittier, Hawthorne, Cooper, Poe, 
Longfellow, Willis, Irving, or Holmes. It is good criticism, 
too, sincerely stating the impression made on a singularly 
alert contemporary mind by writers who have now acquired 



LOWELL 401 

what they did not then surely possess, a fair prospect of perma- 
nence; and the very fantastic oddity of its style, which makes 
prolonged sessions with it so tiresome, has a touch not only of 
native Yankee temper but of incontestable individuality. At 
last permitting himself the full license of extravagant, paradox- 
ical form, Lowell revealed all his amateurish faults ; but he 
revealed too all those peculiar contradictory qualities which made 
the true Lowell a dozen men at once. Nobody else could 
have written quite this thing, and it was worth writing. 

More worth writing still, and equally characteristic, were 
the " Biglow Papers," which were collected at about the same 
time. They were written during the troubles of the Mexican 
War. The slave States had plunged the country into that 
armed aggression, which excited as never before the full fer- 
vour of the antislavery feehng in the North. Just at this time 
the influence of Lowell's wife made his antislavery convic- 
tions strongest. No technical form could seem much less 
literary than that in which he chose to express his passionate 
sentiments. Using the dialect of his native Yankee country, 
and emphasising its oddities of pronunciation by every extrava- 
gance of misspelling, he produced a series of verses which have 
an external aspect of ephemeral popularity. At first glance, 
the laborious humour of Parson Wilbur's pedantry, and the 
formally interminable phrases in which he imbeds it, seem 
radically different from the lines on which they comment. As 
you ponder on them, however, Wilbur's elaborately over- 
studied prose and the dialect verse of Hosea Biglow and Bird- 
o'-Freedom Sawin fall into the same category. Both prove so 
deliberate, both so much matters of detail, that in the end your 
impression may well be, that, taken all in all, each paper is 
tediously ingenious. No one number of the " Biglow Papers " 
is so long as the " Fable for Critics ; " but none is much easier 
to read through. 

In the " Biglow Papers," at the same time, just as in the 
"Fable for Critics," you feel constant flashes of Lowell's 

26 



402 THE RENAISSANCE OF NE W ENGLAND 

rarest power ; in brief, idiomatic phrase he could sum up mat- 
ters on which you may ponder with constantly fresh delight and 
suggestion. Take a familiar stanza from the first paper 
of all : — 

" Ez far war, I call it murder, — 

There you hev it plain and flat ; 
I don't want to go no furder 

Than my Testyment fer that ; 
God hez sed so plump an' fairly. 

It 's ez long ez it is broad, 
An' you 've gut to git up airly 

Ef you want to take in God." 

Nothing could seem much more paradoxical. Here you have 
a scholarly man of letters deliberately assuming the character 
of an ignorant Yankee countryman ; he first emphasises this 
bit of private theatricals by the most obvious comic devices, 
and then, all of a sudden, with the passionate earnestness of a 
serious nature stirred to its depths, he utters solemn words 
concerning God Himself. To bring a phrase like those last 
two lines within the range of decency, requires a power for 
which genius is hardly an excessive name. Yet Lowell, spon- 
taneously true to his paradoxical whimsical self, has made what 
looks like comic verse, and is phrased in a caricature of Yankee 
dialect, a memorable statement of tremendous truth. 

In another familiar stanza from the first of the " Biglow 
Papers," you feel the man of letters more palpably : — 

" Massachusetts, God forgive her. 

She 's akneelin' with the rest, 
She, thet ough' to ha' clung for ever 

In her grand old eagle-nest ; 
She, thet ough' to stand so fearless 

While the wracks are round her hurled, 
Holdin' up a beacon peerless 

To the oppressed of all the world ! " 

But you feel, too, a note to which Boston hearts will vibrate 
so long as Boston hearts are beating. 



LOWELL 403 

What Lowell did in this first " Biglow Paper," he did in all 
such verse which he ever wrote. It was more than fifteen 
years later, in 1862, that he produced " Mason and Slidell, a 
Yankee Idyll," the monstrous rhyme of which title exempifies 
his least pardonable vagaries. In this, the Bunker Hill Monu- 
ment and Concord Bridge have a long colloquy, at the close 
of which the bridge bursts into the following apostrophe : — 

" I feel my sperit swellin' with a cry 
Thet seems to say, ' Break forth an' prophesy ! ' 

strange New World, thet yit wast never young, 
Whose youth from thee by gripin' need was wrung, 
Brown foundlin' o' the woods, whose baby-bed 
Was prowled roun' by the Injun's cracklin' tread. 
An' who grew'st strong thru shifts an' wants an' pain 
Nussed by stern men with empires in their brains, 
Who saw in vision their young Ishmel strain 

With each hard hand a vassal ocean's mane. 

Thou, skilled by Freedom an' by gret events 

To pitch new States ez Old- World men pitch tents, 

Thou, taught by Fate to know Jehovah's plan 

Thet man's devices can't unmake a man, 

An' whose free latch-string never was drawed in 

Against the poorest child of Adam's kin, — 

The grave 's not dug where traitor hands shall lay 

In fearful haste thy murdered corse away ! 

1 see — " 

And then he breaks off in nonsense, and winds up with his 
stanzas on Jonathan and John, wherein you may find that ex- 
traordinary comment on a weakness of our English brethren, 
of which the phrasing is as final as anything which Lowell's 
fantastic pen ever put on paper : — 

"The South says, ' Poor folks downP John, 

An' ' All men up ! ' say we, — 
'White, yaller, black, an' brown, John: 

Now which is your idee ? ' 

Ole Uncle S. sez he, ' I guess, 

John preaches wal,' sez he ; 
' But, sermon thru, an' come to du. 

Why, there 's the old J. B. 

A crowdin' you an' me ! ' " 



404 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

The man was really at his best when he let himself be most 
fantastic, and this because of that whimsical instability of 
temper, which he rarely managed quite to control. Beneath 
his wildest vagaries you will often feel as deep earnestness. 
But he lacked the power generally to sustain either mood quite 
long enough to express it with complete effect. The merit 
of his verses generally lies in admirable single phrases, single 
lines, or at most single stanzas. These flashing felicities 
never have quite the power which should fuse a whole poem 
into congruous unity. Like Lowell's personality, his most 
characteristic verse seems a bewildering collection of disjointed 
fragments, each admirable because of its sincere humanity. 

The quality which so pervades Lowell's poetry equally per- 
vades his prose writings. Open these wherever you will, 
even in the portions which deal with public affairs, and still 
more in those considerable portions which criticise literature, 
and you will anywhere find this same fantastic, boyishly pedan- 
tic range of allusion. You will find, too, all sorts of unex- 
pected turns of phrase, often rushing into actual puns ; again 
you will find elaborate rhetorical structure, stimulated by those 
great draughts of old English prose which Lowell could quaff 
with gusto all his life. " Literary " you feel this man again 
and again ; but by and by you begin to feel that, after all, this 
literature proceeds from an intensely human being with a 
peculiarly Yankee nature. Somewhere about him there is 
always lurking a deep seriousness strangely at odds with his 
obvious mannerisms, his occasional errors of taste, and his 
fantastic oddities of literary behaviour. 

During Lowell's professorship at Harvard he was for some 
years editor of the " Atlantic Monthly," and later had a share 
in editing the "North American Review." At this period 
most of his prose was published. His later writing, produced 
after his diplomatic career began, was mostly occasional ; but 
all along it tended slowly to ripen. Towards the end it gained 
at least in simplicity and dignity ; and this dignity was not 



LOWELL 405 

assumed, but developed. With his slowly attained maturity 
and with that experience of full European life which came 
during his diplomatic experience, — earlier he had known 
Europe only as a traveller, — he gained something which at 
last gave his utterances, along with their old earnestness and 
humanity, a touch of self-respecting humility. Nothing shows 
him more at his best than the short speech on " Our Litera- 
ture " which he made in response to a toast at a banquet given 
in New York to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary 
of Washington's inauguration. The simple hopefulness of 
the closing paragraph, where for once Lowell was not afraid to 
be commonplace, is a fit and admirable conclusion for the six 
volumes of his collected prose : — 

" The literature of a people should be the re'cord of its joys and 
sorrows, its aspirations and its shortcomings, its wisdom and its folly, 
the confidant of its soul. We cannot say that our own as yet suffices 
us, but I believe that he who stands, a hundred years hence, where I 
am standing now, conscious that he speaks to the most powerful and 
prosperous community ever devised or developed by man, will speak 
of our literature with the assurance of one who beholds what we hope 
for and aspire after, become a reality and a possession for ever." 

So if one asks where Lowell finally belongs in the history 
of our New England Renaissance, the answer begins to phrase 
itself. A born Yankee and a natural lover of letters, he in- 
stinctively turned at once to books and to life for the knowl- 
edge which should teach him what humanity has meant and 
what it has striven for. For all the oddities of temper which 
kept him from popularity, the man was always true to his 
intensely human self. In his nature there were constant 
struggles between pure taste and perverse extravagance. As 
a man of letters, then, he was most himself when he per- 
mitted himself forms of expression in which these struggles 
needed no concealment. But through it all there persists 
just such wholesome purity of feeling and purpose as we love 
to think characteristic of New England. Throughout, despite 



4o6 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

whimsical extravagance of phrase, you may finally discern a 
nature at once manly and human. 

" Human," after all, is the word which most often recurs as 
one tries to phrase what Lowell means ; and " human " is an 
adjective which applies equally to two distinctly different 
nouns. In one sense the most truly human being is he who 
most strives to understand those records of the past to which we 
give the name of the humanities. In another sense the most 
deeply human being is he who strives most to understand the 
humanity about him. It was unceasing effort to fuse his 
understanding of the humanities with his understanding of 
humanity which made Lowell so often seem paradoxical. He 
was in constant doubt as to which of these influences signified 
the more ; and this doubt so hampered his power of expres- 
sion that the merit of his writing lies mostly in disjointed 
phrases. At their best, however, these phrases are full of 
humanity and of the humanities alike. In distinction from 
the other Smith Professors, — from Ticknor, the scholar of 
our New England Renaissance, and from Longfellow, its aca- 
demic poet, — Lowell defines himself more and more clearly 
as its earnest humanist. 



XIII 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

When the spirit of Renaissance had finally conquered Boston, 
and people who had clung to Calvinism there found them- 
selves hopelessly out of fashion, the man whom they believed 
most conspicuously to embody those pomps and vanities 
of the wicked world for which account shall be demanded 
in a better, is said to have been Oliver Wendell Holmes. 
-To the Calvinistic mind, indeed, his career was probably 
the most irritating in all New England record. He was 
born, in 1809, at Cambridge, where his father, a Connec- 
ticut man and a graduate of Yale, had for some years been the 
Orthodox minister of the First Church. Though Harvard 
College had already lapsed into Unitarian heresy, this had not 
yet achieved the social conquest of the region. During Dr. 
Holmes's boyhood and youth, however, the struggle grew 
fierce ; and at about the time of his graduation, his father, 
whose devotion to the old creed never wavered, was formally 
deposed from the pulpit which, after nearly forty years of 
occupancy, he stoutly refused to open to Unitarian doctrine. 
The old man, than whom none was ever more faithfully cour- 
ageous, was supported by a majority of the communicants of 
the Cambridge church. A majority of the parish, however, 
preferred the liberal side. This latter body retained the old 
church building, the slender endowment of the parish, and the 
communion-plate. Abiel Holmes, with his saving remnant of 
church-members, was forced to establish a new place of wor- 
ship ; and the question as to which of the two is the more 
direct descendant of the old Puritan society from which both 



4o8 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

have sprung was long disputed by people who delight in such 
dispute. Now Dr. Holmes, in the matter of faithful courage, 
was his father's counterpart. So, in comparatively early life, 
finding himself unable to accept the Calvinistic teachings of 
his youth, he became what he remained all his life, — a sound 
Unitarian. 

This of itself might have been enough to arouse bitter dis- 
approval among the Calvinists. So, almost by itself, might have 
been the pleasantly prosperous circumstances of his personal 
life. His maternal grandfather was a judge, and a Fellow of 
Harvard College. Holmes, then, hereditarily allied with both 
pulpit and bar, was doubly what he used to call a New Eng- 
land Brahmin. Like any good orthodox boy, he was sent to 
school at Andover ; and thence, like any good Cambridge boy, 
he was sent to Harvard too. There he took his degree in 
1829, — a year remembered in college tradition as that which 
produced the most distinguished group of Bachelors of Arts in 
Harvard history. In obedience to the traditions of his mother's 
family, he began the study of law ; but finding this not con- 
genial, he soon turned to medicine. In pursuance of this study 
he went abroad for two or three years, finally receiving the 
degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1836. After a year or two 
of practice, he became in 1839 Professor of Anatomy at Dart- 
mouth College. A year later he returned to Boston, where 
he remained for the rest of his life; and from 1847 ^° 1882 
he was Parkman Professor of Anatomy in the Harvard Medi- 
cal School. 

In the fact that a man of Dr. Holmes's temper and position 
lived for fifty years in Boston as a Unitarian physician, there is 
something characteristic of the city which he knew and loved 
so well. Not long ago there appeared in some English review 
an article on the social position of American men of letters, 
wherein the writer based on the facts that Dr. Holmes prac- 
tised medicine and went to Unitarian meeting the conclusion 
that Holmes was socially insignificant. In England such an 



HOLMES 409 

inference would have been at least probable. There Uni- 
tarianism has often been held an almost blasphemous dissenting 
creed, abhorrent to seriously conservative temper ; and only 
within "the last few years has radicalism been socially tolerated 
in the mother country. In England, too, until very lately, the 
profession of medicine has been held in comparative social dis- 
esteem. In Boston, on the other hand, the isolated capital of 
isolated New England, which has stoutly developed and main- 
tained traditions of its own, Unitarianism, in Dr. Holmes's 
time, enjoyed a social security similar to that of the Established 
Church across the water; and while the three learned profes- 
sions were nominally of equal dignity, that of medicine had 
probably attracted, between 1800 and 1850, rather more men 
who combined breeding with culture than had either bar or 
pulpit. The very circumstances which made English prejudice 
assume Holmes to have been socially inconspicuous and tem- 
peramentally radical, then, were those which would soonest 
lead any one who knew the Boston of his time to assume 
him to have been precisely the reverse. 

This extreme localism of professional character and social 
position is characteristic of Holmes's whole life. After 1840, 
when he finally settled in Boston, he rarely passed a consecu- 
tive month outside of Massachusetts. Among Boston lives 
the only other of eminence which was so uninterruptedly local 
is that of Cotton Mather, The intolerant Calvinistic minister 
typifies seventeenth-century Boston ; the Unitarian physician 
typifies the Boston of the century just past. To both alike, 
Beacon Hill instinctively presented itself, in the phrase which 
Holmes has made so familiar, as the Hub of the Solar System. 

Though throughout Holmes's fifty years of Boston resi- 
dence he was a man of local eminence, his eminence was not 
quite of a professional kind. His practice, in which he took 
no excessive interest, gradually faded away ; and long before 
he gave up his lectures on Anatomy, they were held old- 
fashioned. He neither neglected nor disliked his profession, 



4IO THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

but it did not absorb him ; and as his life proceeded, he prob- 
ably grew less and less patient of that overwhelming mass of 
newly discovered detail which modern physicians must con- 
stantly master. Another reason why his medical career be- 
came less and less important is that from the beginning he 
had a keen interest in literature, and was widely known as a 
poet. Now, a man eminent in a learned profession may cer- 
tainly be eminent in letters too, but public opinion hates to 
have him so ; and any youth who would succeed in law or 
medicine can hear no sounder advice than that which Dr. 
Holmes is said often to have given in his later years, — 
namely, that you should never let people suppose you seriously 
interested in anything but your regular work. In the very year 
when Holmes had returned from Europe to begin practice, 
he published a volume of poems; and at least three subsequent 
collections appeared before, with the beginning of the " Atlantic 
iVIonthly," he became known as a remarkable writer of prose. 
His writings, then, steadily distracted attention from his profes- 
sion. Nor is this the whole story. Holmes's local eminence was 
perhaps chiefly due to his social gifts. Early in life he acquired 
the reputation of being the best talker ever heard in Boston ; 
and this he maintained unbroken to the very end. 

It has lately been observed of Boston society that the city is 
still so fixed in its traditions that everybody who becomes 
widely known there is assumed to possess distinct character- 
istics which it becomes his social business to maintain. In 
the beginning he chooses his part ; then the unspoken force 
of local opinion compels him to play it straight through. 
Some such experience probably happened to Dr. Holmes. 
Years did their consequent work. In his later life his con- 
versation and his wit alike, always spontaneous and often of 
a quality which would have been excellent anywhere, are said 
sometimes to have been overwhelming. His talk tended to 
monologue, and his wit to phrases so final that nobody could 
think of anything to say in return. There was humorous 



HOLMES 411 

and characteristic good-nature in that title, the " Autocrat of 
the Breakfast Table," which he gave, so early as 1831, to a 
couple of articles written for a now forgotten periodical called 
the " New England Magazine." Fully twenty-five years 
elapsed before he published anything else of the kind. Then, 
when in 1857 ^^ began those papers under the same title 
which have become permanent in our literature, his opening 
phrase is whimsically characteristic : " I was going to say, 
when I was interrupted," Whereupon, after twenty-five 
years of interruption, he proceeds with the autocratic utter- 
ances now familiar all over the world. The contagious 
good-humour of this title, like the whimsicality of that little 
reference to the lapse of a quarter of a century, indicates the 
quality which made Holmes popular, despite his habit of 
keeping the floor and of saying admirably unanswerable things. 
His friends were heartily attached to him. They recognised 
in him a social autocrat, but one to whom they were glad to 
listen ; they fervently believed that nobody had ever been like 
him, and that in all probability nobody ever would be. 

Up to middle life Dr. Holmes's literary reputation was that 
of a poet, whose work was chiefly social. Almost his first 
publication, to be sure, " Old Ironsides," was " an impromptu 
outburst of feeling," caused by a notice in a newspaper that the 
old frigate " Constitution " was to be destroyed. His fervent 
verses not only achieved their purpose of saving from destruc- 
tion that historical craft, whose hulk still lies at the Charles- 
town Navy Yard, but have retained popularity. Few lines are 
more familiar to American school-boys than the opening one : 
" Ay, tear her tattered ensign down ! " Most of Holmes's 
early verse, however, may be typified by the first stanza of 
" My Aunt " : — . 

" My aunt ! my dear unmarried aunt ! 
Long years have o'er her flown ; 
Yet still she strains the aching clasp 
That binds her virgin zone ; 



412 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

I know it hurts her — though she looks 

As cheerful as she can ; 
Her waist is ampler than her life, 

For life is but a span." 

Such verse as this, with its light good-humour and its reckless 
pun, is of a sort which for want of a native English term we 
call vers de societe. 

Of social verse in every sense of the word Holmes early 
showed himself a master ; and to the end his mastery never 
relaxed. At least during the nineteenth century it has been cus- 
tomary in the region of Boston to celebrate anniversaries and 
other formal occasions by regular orations and poems. A 
perpetual type of such functions may be found in the annual 
oration and poem delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa society 
of Harvard College. At formal dinners, too, it has been cus- 
tomary to vary the monotony of speeches by occasional essays 
in verse ; and this custom has probably produced an amount 
of ephemeral metrical composition, sometimes avowed dog- 
gerel, sometimes aspiring to be poetry, more than equal in 
bulk to the entire lyric and dramatic poetry of Elizabethan 
England. Among the writers of this occasional verse socially 
demanded by his time, Holmes early acquired distinction ; 
and as the work amid which it was produced has justly been 
forgotten, Holmes's occasional verse, which in both senses of 
the term forms the better part of his poetic utterance, has 
already acquired some such apparent isolation as one feels 
in the transcendental aphorisms of Emerson. The time is not 
far ofF, if indeed it be not on us already, when people will 
think of Holmes not as a man who did the common work of 
a school decidedly better than the rest, but rather as the only 
man who did it at all. 

He wrote verses for almost every kind of occasion which 
demanded them. The occasions most frequent in their 
demands, however, were those which occur in the yearly life 
of Harvard College. Holmes was perhaps the most com- 



HOLMES 413 

pletely loyal Harvard man of his century. Both at the formal 
ceremonies of the college, then, and at the more intimate 
meetings of his college class, he was constantly called on for 
poems which he never failed to give. So whoever wants to 
understand the temper of Harvard cannot do better than satu- 
rate himself with those verses which Holmes has made part of 
the college history. Many of these recall the older traditions 
of Harvard, none more jauntily than the song he wrote for the 
two hundredth anniversary of the college in 1836 : — 

" And when at length the College rose. 

The sachem cocked his eye 
At every tutor's meagre ribs 

Whose coat-tails whistled by : ' 

But when the Greek and Hebrew words 

Came tumbling from his jaws, 
The copper-coloured children all 

Ran screaming to the squaws. 

" And who was on the Catalogue 

When college was begun ? 
Two nephews of the President, 

And the Professor's son ; 
(They turned a little Indian by, 

As brown as any bun ; ) 
Lord ! how the seniors knocked about 

The freshman class of one ! " 

More characteristic of his riper years was an inimitable com- 
bination of reckless fun and tender sentiment such as makes 
peculiarly his own the first verses of his poem for the " Meet- 
ing of the Alumni " in 1857: — 

" I thank you, Mr. President, 3rou've kindly broke the ice; 
Virtue should always be the first, — I 'm only Second Vice — 
(A vice is something with a screw that 's made to hold its jaw 
Till some old file has played away upon an ancient saw). 

" Sweet brothers by the Mother's side, the babes of days gone by, 
All nurslings of her Juno breasts whose milk is never dry, 
We come again, like half-grown boys, and gather at her beck 
About her knees, and on her lap, and clinging round her neck. 



414 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

"We find her at her stately door, and in her ancient chair, 
Dressed in the robes of red and green she always loved to wear. 
Her eye has all its radiant youth, her cheek its morning flame ; 
We drop our roses as we go, hers flourish still the same." 

His class poems, again, tell of old-fashioned class feeling as 
nothing else can. Here is a random verse from one that he 
made in 1867 : — 

" So when upon the fated scroll 

The falling stars ^ have ..11 descended, 
And, blotted from the breathing roll, 

Our little page of life is ended. 
We ask but one memorial line 

Traced on thy tablet. Gracious Mother : 
' My children. Boys of '29. 

In pace. How they loved each other ! ' " 

And Holmes could speak for the new Harvard as well as 
for the old. In 1886, when the college celebrated its two 
hundred and fiftieth anniversary, Lowell delivered an oration 
and Holmes a poem. He was then an old man, addressed to a 
task of solemn dignity, and his verse lacked the vivacity which 
almost to that time had seemed perennial ; but passages of it 
show him as sympathetic with the future as his older college 
verses show him with the past. Take, for example, the stirring 
lines in which he sets forth the conflict of Harvard with the 
ghost of Calvinism : — 

" As once of old from Ida's lofty height 
The flaming signal flashed across the night, 
So Harvard's beacon sheds its unspent rays 
Till every watch-tower shows its kindling blaze. 
Caught from a spark and fanned by every gale, 
A brighter radiance gilds the roofs of Yale; 
Amherst and Williams bid their flambeaus shine, 
And Bowdoin answers through her groves of pine ; 
O'er Princeton's sands the far reflections steal, 
Where mighty Edwards stamped his iron heel ; 

1 In the Quinquennial Catalogue of Harvard, the names of the dead are 
designated by asterisks. When the catalogues were still phrased in Latin, 
then, the Harvard dead were described by the quaintly barbarous terra 
Stelli^eri. 



HOLMES 41S 

Nay on the hill ^ where old beliefs were bound 
Fast as if Styx had girt them nine times round, 
Bursts such a light that trembUng souls inquire 
If the whole church of Calvin is on fire ! 
Well may they ask, for what so brightly burns 
As a dry creed that nothing ever learns ? 
Thus link by link is knit the flaming chain 
Lit by the torch of Harvard's hallowed plain." 

In the form taken by this most serious of his occasional 
poems there is somethirig characteristic. The verse groups it- 
self in memory vi^ith that of another poem, not included in his 
collected works, which he read at a dinner given in honour of 
Lowell's seventieth birthday. Holmes was ten years older, 
and Mr. Sidney Bartlett, the acknowledged leader of the 
Boston bar, was ten years older still. So Holmes made some 
whimsical allusion to Lowell's youth and then to his own 
maturity; and finally spoke of Bartlett, 

" the lion of the law; 
All Court Street trembles when he leaves his den, 
Clad in the pomp of fourscore years and ten." 

These lines were read on the 22d of February, 1889; yet 
if any student of English literature should be given that 
couplet by itself, he would probably guess it to be the work 
of some contemporary of Alexander Pope. The trait which 
appears here characterises Holmes's occasional verse through- 
out. So able a critic as Mr. Stedman, indeed, holds it to 
characterise all his poetry. In many aspects Holmes's tem- 
per was that of an earlier day than his. As Mr. Stedman 
happily observes, his verse is not a revival of eighteenth- 
century literature, but rather its last survival. 

The more one considers Holmes's work in its entirety, the 
more significant one finds this criticism, which Mr. Stedman first 
uttered only of its versified phase. Revivals of the eight- 
eenth century — " Henry Esmond," for example, or Mr. Dob- 

1 Andover Hill. 



4i6 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

son's essays — have been common enough in these days when 
all fine art has been for a while eclectic. Modern artists are 
more apt to express themselves in the manner of some bygone 
age than in any spontaneously characteristic of their own time. 
Holmes, however, seems as far from artificial in manner as if 
he had flourished at a time which had an instinctively settled 
style of its own. That his manner proves so much in the 
spirit of the eighteenth century, then, indicates something char- 
acteristic not only of the man, but of the world about him. 
For full fifty years he rarely stirred from New England ; no 
other writer lived under such completely local circumstances. 
His manner, then, so like that prevalent in the mother coun- 
try a hundred years before, seems a fresh bit of evidence 
that, despite our superficial modernity, America has lagged 
behind that elder world with which it has not been at one 
for more than two hundred years. 

The Boston where Holmes lived, however, and where for 
years he was so eminent a social figure, was the same Boston 
which was thrilling with all the fervid vagaries of our Renais- 
sance. The old formal traditions had been broken ; our 
native mind had been enfranchised ; and people were search- 
ing the eternities for vistas of truth and beauty which had 
been obscured by the austere dogmas of Puritanism. Deeply 
conservative in external temper, loving social order, and dis- 
trusting vagaries of thought and of conduct alike. Holmes 
had small sympathy with the extravagances of Transcendental- 
ism or of reform ; but he could not have been truly contem- 
porary with these movements without catching something of 
their spirit. So if in one aspect he was what Mr, Stedman 
has called him, a survivor of the eighteenth century, in an- 
other he was inevitably a Yankee of the Renaissance. 

Like the men about him, he was seized with an impulse to 
search for truth and to report it. What chiefly distinguishes 
him from the rest is that they were most deeply stirred by the 
charm of romanticism. They were attracted by ideal phi- 



HOLMES 417 

losophy and mediaeval poetry. In such history, too, as had 
hitherto been neglected by New England, they found most 
stimulating and satisfying those passages which appeal to 
romantic emotion. In this they delighted with all the ardour 
of a race which for two hundred years had been aesthetically 
starved. America, however, had been poor in another range 
of human experience. Throughout Europe, the eighteenth 
century was a period of alert common sense, observing life 
keenly, commenting on it with astonishing wit, but generally 
behaving as if romantic emotion might be disregarded as 
superstitious. When the Renaissance finally dawned on New 
England, then, New England lacked not only the untrammelled 
romanticism of a dozen old centuries, but also the eager 
rationalism which had been the most characteristic trait of 
eighteenth-century Europe. 

This feature of the new learning Holmes found most con- 
genial. In the form and spirit of his verse, as Mr. Stedman 
says, there is something which makes him a survival of the 
eighteenth century ; and though the form of his prose is freely 
individual, its spirit seems as essentially that of the eighteenth 
century as if every line of his essays and novels had been 
thrown into heroic couplets. 

The first instalment of his final " Autocrat of the Break- 
fast Table " — revived after that casual interruption of twenty- 
five years — appeared in the first number of the "Atlantic' 
Monthly " in the autumn of 1857. Within the next thirty 
years Holmes produced four volumes of such essays as the 
" Autocrat," and three more or less formal novels. Through- 
out this prose work of his maturity and his age, — he was 
nearly fifty years old when it began, — one feels the shrewd, 
swift, volatile mind of a witty man of the world. One feels, 
too, the temper of a trained though not very learned man of 
science ; education and professional experience combined with 
native good sense to make him understand the value of de- 
monstrable fact. One feels almost as surely another trait, 

27 



41 8 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

too. Holmes could not have been a Bostonian during those 
years of Renaissance when Boston was the intellectual centre 
of America, without keen interest in something like mys- 
ticism ; but beyond any other New England man of his time 
Holmes treats mystical vagaries as only fancies, — beautiful, 
perhaps, and stimulating, but inherently beyond the range of 
assertion as distinguished from speculation. In one sense no 
Transcendentalist more constantly devoted himself to the task 
of proving all things and holding fast those which were 
good. From beginning to end, however. Holmes knew that 
things can truly be proved only by observation and experi- 
ment. So just as in our final view of the New England Re- 
naissance Ticknor seems its most eminent scholar, Longfellow 
its most typical poet, and Lowell its deepest humanist, so 
Holmes seems its one uncompromising rationalist. 

This aspect of him goes far to explain afresh why of all his 
contemporaries he was the most abhorrent to Calvinists. The 
phase of mental activity which is least compatible with dogma 
is an ardent rational spirit ; and here the orthodox Calvinists of 
New England found the son of one of their most sturdy lead- 
ers, lapsed into Unitarianism, enjoying a career of social com- 
fort and distinction forbidden them, and expressing himself in 
the temper which of all imaginable was most hostile to their 
dogmatic faith in the damnable wickedness of human nature. 
What was more, his personal life was such as to warrant the 
respect and kindliness with which his friends regarded him. 
But the devil showed plain traces in Holmes's way of talking 
lightly. If this world is what the Calvinists hold it, for most 
of us only the antechamber of damnation, such frivolity of 
manner is among the most appalling evidences of depravity. 
Holmes's rationalism, then, advanced with all the gay ease of 
a fashion from which orthodoxy was debarred, might seem 
enough to account for orthodox detestation of him. 

As you read his work, however, with this matter in view, 
you will find a deeper reason still. Holmes's youth had been 



HOLMES 419 

surrounded by the strictest Calvinism, at a moment when New 
England Calvinism had outlived its vitality and when the 
spiritual thought of his native region was at last taking its en- 
franchised Unitarian form. The whole horror of the old sys- 
tem, then, with its inhuman limitation of intellectual and 
spiritual freedom, had been within his personal experience at 
the period of life when impressions sink deepest. He early 
developed the liberal and kindly rationalism so admirably 
expressed in his personal and literary career. The horrors of 
the elder creed, however, were seared into his brain. In his 
later life, whether actually aware of them or not, he could 
never efface them from his subconsciousness. Long ago, 
when we were trying to understand Jonathan Edwards, we 
found ourselves contemplating that famous " One-Hoss Shay " 
of Holmes's, with which the impregnable logic of Calvinism 
somehow came to smash. Far from standing alone in his 
work, this well-known piece of verse seems rather to typify 
the greater part of it. 

Take " Elsie Venner," for example, his first and most con- 
siderable novel. Although amateurish in detail, the book is 
vivid with New England life ; but the gist of it is abhorrent 
to every tradition of the ancestral Calvinists. The fiction, 
which, to use one of Holmes's own terms, is medicated 
throughout, is designed to suggest that purely physical causes 
can so affect moral nature as to make gravely doubtful how 
far human beings ought to be held morally responsible. What 
is more. Holmes does not hesitate openly to expound this 
doctrine. A student of medicine, for example, puzzled by the 
case of ante-natal impression which forms the basis of the 
plot, writes about it to one of his professors. This incident 
gives the professor an opportunity to reply as follows : — 

" Your question about inherited predispositions, as limiting the 
sphere of the will, and, consequently, of moral accountability, opens a 
very wide range of speculation. I can give you only a brief abstract 
of my own opinion of this delicate and difficult subject. Crime and 



420 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

sin, being tlie preserves of two great organised interests, have been 
guarded against all reforming poachers with as great jealousy as the 
Royal Forests. It is so easy to hang a troublesome fellow ! It is so 
much simpler to consign a soul to perdition, or to say masses, for 
money, to save it, than to take the blame on ourselves for letting it 
grow up in neglect and run to ruin for want of humanising in- 
fluences. . . . 

" It is very singular that we recognise all the bodily defects that un- 
fit a man for military service, and all the intellectual ones that limit his 
range of thought, but always talk at him as if all his moral powers 
were perfect. I suppose we must punish evildoers as we extirpate 
vermin ; but I don't know that we have any more right to judge them 
than we have to judge rats and mice, which are just as good as cats 
and weasels, though we think it necessary to treat them as criminals." 

The passage from the " Professor at the Breakfast Table '* 
in which Holmes savagely satirises both the dogmas and the 
discipline of Calvinistic orthodoxy is perhaps better known : 

" If, before a medical practitioner would allow me to enjoy the full 
privileges of the healing art," it begins, "he expected me to affirm my 
belief in a considerable number of medical doctrines, drugs, and for- 
mulae, I should think that he thereby implied my right to discuss the 
same, and my ability to do so, if I knew how to express myself in 
English. 

"Suppose, for instance, the Medical Society should refuse to give 
us an opiate, or to set a broken limb, until we had signed our belief in 
a certain number of propositions, — of which we will say this is the 
first : — 

" I. All men's teeth are naturally in a state of total decay, or caries ; 
and, therefore, no one can bite until every one of them is extracted 
and a new set is inserted according to the principles of dentistry 
adopted by this Society. 

" I, for one, should want to discuss that before signing my name to 
it, and I should say this : — Why, no, that is n't true." — 

And so on. 

Nor were Holmes's attacks on the Calvinists only indirect. 
Some years ago the innumerable missionary and other godly 
societies which had sprung up in Boston were accustomed to 
hold their annual meetings at about the same time every spring. 
The feast of spiritual stimulant thus afforded by Anniversary 
Week attracted to town such flocks of blackbirds from the 



HOLMES 421 

country pulpits that the face of the Common was annually 
darkened. To most people the sight of these visitants was 
mildly amusing. To Holmes they suggested rather such sen- 
timents as he set forth in the " Moral Bully " : — 

" Yon whey-faced brother, who delights to wear 
A weedy flux of ill-conditioned hair, 
Seems of the sort that in a crowded place 
One elbows freely into smallest space ; 
A timid creature, lax of knee and hip. 
Whom small disturbance whitens round the lip ; 
One of those harmless spectacled machines, 
The Holy-Week of Protestants convenes ; 



Conspicuous, annual, in their threadbare suits, 
And the laced high-lows which they call their boots, 
Well mayst thou shun that dingy front severe, 
But him, O stranger, him thou canst noi/ear/ 

" Be slow to judge, and slower to despise, 
Man of broad shoulders and heroic size ! 

In that lean phantom, whose extended glove 
Points to the text of universal love. 
Behold the master that can tame thee down 
To crouch the vassal of his Sunday frown ; 
His velvet throat against thy corded wrist, 
His loosened tongue against thy doubled fist ! 

" The MORAL BULLY, though he never swears. 
Nor kicks intruders down his entry stairs. 
Though meekness plants his backward-sloping hat, 
And non-resistance ties his white cravat. 
Though his black broadcloth glories to be seen 
In the same plight with Shylock's gaberdine, 
Hugs the same passion to his narrow breast, 
That heaves the cuirass on the trooper's chest, 
Hears the same hell-hounds yelling in his rear 
That chase from port the maddened buccaneer, 
Feels the same comfort while his acrid words. 
Turn the sweet milk of kindness into curds, 
Or with grim logic prove, beyond debate. 
That all we love is worthiest our hate, 
As the scarred ruffian of the pirate's deck. 
When his long swivel rakes the staggering wreck ! " 



422 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

Such were Holmes's comments on his contemporaries who 
followed in the footsteps of Jonathan Edwards. Of Edwards 
himself he wrote, if possible, more plainly still : — 

" The practical effect of Edwards's teachings about the relations of 
God and man has bequeathed a lesson not to be forgotten. A revival 
in which the majority of converts fell away ; nervous disorders of all 
sorts, insanity, suicide, among the rewards of his eloquence ; Religion 
dressed up in fine phrases and made much of, while Morality, her Poor 
Relation, was getting hard treatment at the hands of the young persons 
who had grown up under the reign of terror of the Northampton pul- 
pit; ahenation of the hearts of his people to such an extent as is 
rarely seen in the bitterest quarrels between pastor and flock, — if this 
was a successful ministry, what disasters would constitute a failure ? " 

The truth is that Holmes was not only antagonistic to the 
temper of Calvinism in life and character ; he was also its 
most openly and bitterly persistent opponent. The more you 
read his prose, the more you feel his consciousness of the old 
creed cropping out in places where you least expect it. The 
traditional Unitarianism of New England was apt to neglect 
orthodoxy ; Holmes could not. The dogmas of Calvin lurked 
constantly in his mind ; and he never failed to attack them. 
This hideous system is untrue, he protests ; he will deny it ; 
he will oppose it in every possible way ; if so may be he will 
leave the world better for his work in the destruction of this 
most monstrous of its spiritual errors. So Holmes, who in his 
superficial life is remembered as the wittiest and happiest of 
New England social figures, and as the most finished as well 
as the most tenderly sentimental maker of our occasional verse, 
and who wrote so much even of his most serious work with 
the temper and the manner of a wit, proves to have another 
aspect. Among our men of letters this rationalist was the 
most sturdy, the most militant, the most pitiless enemy of a 
superstition whose tyranny over his childhood had left life- 
long scars. In the persistency with which this spectre of 
Calvinism rose before him there was something which he may 
well have fancied to be like the diabolic possessions so fer- 



HOLMES 423 

vently believed in by the Puritan fathers. He might lay the 
spectre again and again, but every time he took up his pen it 
would arise inhuman as ever. That he never relaxed his fight 
shows rare courage. From beginning to end, then. Holmes 
was a survivor of the eighteenth century. Brave rationalistic 
attack on outworn superstitions is the bravest note of that past 
epoch. 

If there be any one European figure whose position in 
world literature is analogous to that of Holmes in the litera- 
ture of New England, it is Voltaire. The differences between 
Voltaire and Holmes, to be sure, are so much more marked 
than the analogies that any analogy may at first seem fantas- 
tic. For all his eminence, Voltaire was not born a gentleman 
and never had quite the traits of one ; in our little New Eng- 
land there was never a better gentleman than Holmes. Vol- 
taire was a man of licentious life and pitiless temper, incensed 
and distracted by all the old-world corruptions which he spent 
his wits in stabbing to death ; Holmes's life had all the simple 
provincial decency and kindliness of his country. Voltaire's 
wit was the keenest and most sustained of modern Europe ; 
the wit of Holmes, after all, was only the most delightful which 
has amused nineteenth-century Boston. For all these differ- 
ences, there is a true analogy between them : both alike, with 
superficial frivolity, bravely devoted themselves to lifelong war 
against what they believed to be delusions which terribly im- 
peded the progress of human nature towards a better future. 
And each was so earnest that neither could help expressing 
himself in such manner as to his nature was true. Vol- 
taire's wit, then, teems with blasphemy and Ucentiousness ; 
that of Holmes is pure of either. This does not mean that 
one man was essentially better or worse than the other ; it 
means rather that the worlds in which they lived and the 
superstitions which they combated were different. 

Voltaire died in 1770 ; Holmes as a writer of prose hardly 
existed before 1857. The two are a full century apart, yet 



424 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

there is between them such likeness as almost seems intellect- 
ually contemporary. In the contrast between them, then, 
there is something which freshly throws familiar light on New 
England. The contrast between Holmes and Voltaire, if in 
one sense a contrast between the eighteenth century and the 
nineteenth, is in another sense a contrast between a foul old 
Europe and an America still pure in its national inexperience. 
Above all, it is a contrast which distinctly shows what freshness 
of nature and feeling still marked America in Holmes's time. 
Few men ever expressed themselves less guardedly than he ; yet 
so far as licentiousness or blasphemy is concerned every line of 
his printed works may be put unreservedly in the hands of 
any child. Even to our own time the history of American 
human nature implies our national inexperience. In the New 
England Renaissance, rationalism itself, and all the freedom of 
earnest satire, appears for once void of impurity. 



XIV 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

In our study of the New England Renaissance we have 
glanced at Emerson, whom we may call its prophet ; at 
Whittier, who so admirably phrased its aspirations for reform ; 
at Longfellow, its academic poet ; at Lowell, its humanist ; 
and at Holmes, its rationalist. The period produced but one 
other literary figure of equal eminence with these, — Nathaniel 
Hawthorne, above and beyond the others an artist. 

His origin was different from that of his contemporaries 
whom we have lately considered. Emerson and Longfellow 
and Lowell and Holmes were all born into the social class 
which at their time was dominant in New England; and 
Whittier sprang from sturdy country yeomen. Hawthorne 
came from a family eminent in early colonial days, but long 
lapsed into that sort of obscurity which modern cant would call 
social degeneracy. His father, a ship captain of the period 
when New England commerce was most vigorous, died in 
Guiana when Hawthorne was only four years old ; and the 
boy, who had been born at Salem in 1804, grew up there in 
his mother's care, singularly solitary. His youthful experience 
was confined to Salem, then a more important town than 
now, but already showing symptoms of decline. He made at 
least one prolonged visit in search of health to the woods of 
Maine. To this day wild and then wilder still, these forests 
early made familiar to him the atmosphere of our ancestral 
wilderness. In 1821 he went to Bowdoin College. There he 
was a student with Longfellow, and of Franklin Pierce, after- 
wards President of the United States. His friendship with 



426 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

the latter was close and lifelong. In 1825, they took their 
degrees at Bowdoin. 

For the ensuing fourteen years Hawthorne lived with his 
mother at Salem, so quietly that his existence was hardly known 
to the townsfolk of that gossipy little Yankee seaport. He 
spent much time indoors, constantly writing but neither suc- 
cessful nor generally recognised as an author. He took long 
solitary walks, and his personal appearance is said to have been 
romantic and picturesque. In 1839 he was appointed a clerk 
in the Boston Custom House j in 1841 the spoils system 
turned him out of office, and for a few months he was at 
Brook Farm. The next year he married, and from then until 
1846 he lived at Concord, writing and by this time pleasantly 
recognised as a writer of short stories. From 1846 to 1849 
he was Surveyor in the Custom House of Salem. During 
the ensuing four years, when he resided at various places in 
Massachusetts, he produced his three most characteristic long 
books, — the " Scarlet Letter," the " House of the Seven 
Gables," and the " Blithedale Romance," — as well as his two 
volumes of mythological stories for children, the " Wonder- 
book " and " Tanglewood Tales." In 1853, his friend. Presi- 
dent Pierce, made him Consul at Liverpool. He remained 
abroad until i860, passing some time during his later stay there 
in Italy. From this experience resulted the " Marble Faun." 
In i860, he came home and returned to Concord, where 
he lived thenceforth. He died in the White Mountains, on 
the 1 8th of May, 1864. 

Chronologically, then, Hawthorne's position in New Eng- 
land literature seems earlier than that of his contemporaries at 
whom we have glanced. He was only a year younger than 
Emerson, he was three years older than Longfellow and 
Whittier, five years older than Holmes, and fifteen years older 
than Lowell. He died thirty-six years ago ; and Emerson and 
Longfellow survived until 1882, Lowell till 189 1, Whittier 
till 1892, and Holmes till 1895. Though Hawthorne, how- 



HA WTHORNE 427 

ever, was the first to die of this little company, he had been a 
fellow-writer with them during the thirty years when the full 
literary career of all had declared itself. In the time which 
followed Hawthorne's death, the survivors wrote and pub- 
lished copiously ; but none produced anything which much 
altered the reputation he had achieved while Hawthorne was 
still alive. So far as character goes, in short, the literature of 
renascent New England was virtually complete in 1864. 

Under such circumstances chronology becomes accidental. 
The order in which to consider contemporaries is a question 
simply of their relative character. We had good reason, then, 
for reserving Hawthorne till the last ; for above all the rest, as 
we have already remarked, he was an artist. This term is so 
general that we may well linger on it for a moment. A little 
story of the Yankee country may help define our meaning. 
Not long ago a sportsman, who had started out in a dory 
along with a native fisherman, found himself becalmed at 
night off the New Hampshire coast. Observing that the 
fisherman, who had sat quiet for a little while, was staring at 
the North Star, he asked what he was thinking about. " I was 
thinkin'," drawled out the Yankee, " how fur off" you 'd hev 
to be to get that south of you." Whereupon he shook him- 
self and fell to his oars. That momentary experience, you 
see, had awakened in a Yankee countryman something like 
imaginative emotion. He spoke it out, and then forgot it ; 
but just for a moment he had felt the impulse of artistic 
spirit, and had found relief in an expression imaginative enough 
to be memorable. Some such experience as this everybody 
knows sometimes, many people often ; and occasionally there 
are born into the world natures so sensitive to impressions that 
they find almost every day overcharged with emotions from 
which they can find relief only in attempts at expression. 
Generally such expression is of only momentary value. Now 
and again, however, some human being proves endowed not only 
with sensitiveness to impulse but with mastery of expression 



428 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

as well. Such a man, whatever his art, is an artist ; and such 
was Hawthorne. 

It chances that fate has posthumously treated him with ex- 
ceptional irony. The general solitude of his life was partly 
due to a fastidious reticence which made him shrink from per- 
sonal revelation. This trait was not inherited by his children ; 
so since his death we have had more publications from his 
note-books, and more records of his private life than is the 
case with anybody else in American literary history. Among 
these posthumous records none are more characteristic or 
valuable than the first which appeared. The " Passages from 
American Note Books," published in 1868, extend over many 
years, mostly before Hawthorne's sojourn abroad. For our 
purposes they are perhaps the most significant of all his work. 
They show him in various parts of the New England country, 
freshly impressed almost every day with some aspect of life 
which aroused in him concrete reaction. He actually pub- 
lished tales enough to establish more than one literary reputa- 
tion. These note-books show how few fragments of his 
wealthy imaginative impulse he ever coined into finished lit- 
erary form. They reveal, too, another characteristic fact. 
Though Hawthorne wrote hardly any formal verse, though his 
natural impulse to expression rarely if ever took metrical form, 
he was a genuine poet. His only vehicle of expression was 
language, and to him language meant not only words but 
rhythm too. Even in these memoranda, then, which he never 
expected to stray beyond his note-books, you feel the constant 
touch of one whose meaning is so subtle that its most careless 
expression must fall into delicately careful phrasing. 

Such a temperament would inevitably have declared itself 
anywhere. Some critics, then, have lamented the accident 
which confined Hawthorne's experience for almost fifty years 
to isolated, aesthetically starved New England. In this opin- 
ion there is considerable justice. The extreme localism of 
Hawthorne's life, until his maturity was passing into age, may 



HA WTHORNE 429 

veiy likely have made world literature poorer. The " Marble 
Faun " is our only indication of what he might have done if 
his sensitive youth had been exposed to the unfathomably 
human influence of Europe. Yet, whatever our loss, we can 
hardly regret an accident so fortunate to the literature of New 
England. 

This Hawthorne, whose artistic temperament would have 
been remarkable anywhere, chanced to be born in an old 
Yankee seaport, just at its zenith. It was soon to be stricken 
by the Embargo, and swiftly to be surpassed by a more pros- 
perous neighbour. When he knew it best, it was like some 
iridescent old sea-shell, whose denizens are dead and gone, 
but whose hollows still faintly vibrate with the voices of the 
illimitable waters. From this passing, ancestral Salem he 
visited those woods of Maine which were still so primeval as 
to recall the shadowy forests whose mystery confronted the 
immigrant Puritans. Then he lived for a while in Boston, 
just when Transcendentalism was most in the air ; and he had 
a glimpse of Brook Farm ; and he passed more than one year 
in the Old Manse at Concord ; and finally he strayed among 
the hills of Berkshire. Until he finally set sail for Eng- 
land, however, he had never known any earthly region which 
had not traditionally been dominated by the spirit of the 
Puritans ; nor any which in his own time was not alive, so 
far as life was in it, with the spirit of the New England 
Renaissance. 

In considering this period, we have hitherto dwelt only on 
its most obvious aspect. Like any revelation of new life, it 
seemed to open the prospect of an illimitably excellent future. 
Amid such buoyant hopes people think little of the past, tend- 
ing indeed to regard it like some night of darkness to which at 
last the dawn has brought an end. They forget the infinite 
mysteries of the night, its terrors and its dreamy beauties, and 
the courage of those who throughout its tremulous course 
have watched and prayed. So when the dawn comes they 



430 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

forget that the birth of day is the death of night. Thus the 
men of our New England Renaissance forgot that their new, 
enfranchised life and literature meant the final passing of that 
elder New England so hopefully founded by the Puritan 
fathers. As our Renaissance has passed its swift zenith, and 
begun itself to recede into dimming memory, we can see more 
plainly than of old this tragic aspect of its earthly course. 
The world in which Hawthorne lived and wrote was not 
only a world where new ideals were springing into life ; it 
was a world, too, where the old ideals were suffering their 
agony. 

Of all our men of letters Hawthorne was most sensitive to 
this phase of the time when they flourished together. He was 
not, like Emerson, a prophet striving to glean truths from un- 
explored fields of eternity ; he was not, like Whittier, a 
patient limner of simple nature, or a passionate advocate of 
moral reform j he was not, like Longfellow or Lowell, a lov- 
ing student of world literature, moved by erudition to the ex- 
pression of what meaning he had found in the records of a 
wonderful foreign past ; he was not, like Holmes, a combatant 
who, with all the vivacity of lifelong wit and all the method of 
scientific training, rationally attacked the chimeras of his time; 
he was an artist, who lived for nearly fifty years only in his 
native country, daily stirred to attempt expression of what our 
Yankee life meant. Of all our men of letters he was the 
most indigenous ; of all, the least imitative. 

By hastily comparing his work, then, with some which was 
produced in England during the same years, we may perhaps 
define our notion of what the peculiar trait of American letters 
has been. His first collection of " Twice Told Tales " 
appeared in 1837 ; in England, where the Oueen had just 
come to the throne, Dickens published " Oliver Twist," and 
Thackeray the " Yellowplush Papers." The second series of 
"Twice Told Tales" came in 1842, when Bulwer published 
" Zanoni," and Dickens his " American Notes," and Macaulay 



HAWTHORNE 431 

his " Lays." In 1846, when Hawthorne published the 
" Mosses from an Old Manse," Dickens published " Dombey 
and Son." In 1850, the year of the " Scarlet Letter," came 
Mrs. Browning's " Sonnets from the Portuguese," and Car- 
lyle's " Latter Day Pamphlets," and Tennyson's " In Me- 
moriam ; " in 1851, along with the "House of the Seven 
Gables," came " Casa Guidi Windows" and the "Stones of 
Venice;" in 1852, with the " Blithedale Romance," came 
Dickens's " Bleak House," and Charles Reade's " Peg Woff- 
ington," and Thackeray's " Henry Esmond;" in 1853, ^^ong 
with " Tanglewood Tales," came Kingsley's " Hypatia," Bul- 
wer's « My Novel," and Miss Yonge's " Heir of Redclyffe ; " 
and in the year of the "Marble Faun," i860, came the 
" Woman in White," the " Mill on the Floss," the " Cloister 
and the Hearth," and the last volume of " Modern Painters." 
The list already grows tediously long for our purpose. Like 
Irving and Poe, the two Americans who preceded him as liter- 
ary artists, Hawthorne proves, the moment you compare him 
with the contemporary writers of England, to be gifted or 
hampered with a pervasive sense of form which one is half 
disposed to call classic. 

Yet that term " classic," applied even to Irving, and still more 
to Poe or Hawthorne, must seem paradoxical if one has sym- 
pathetically read them. Such terms as " romantic " and 
" classic " of course are inexactly bewildering ; but for general 
purposes one would not go far wrong who should include under 
the term " classic "that sort of human impulse which reached its 
highest form in the fine arts of Greece, and under the term " ro- 
mantic " that which most nearly approached realization in the 
art and the literature of mediaeval Europe. The essence of 
classic art is perhaps that the artist realises the limits of his con- 
ception, and within those limits endeavours to make his expres- 
sion completely beautiful. The essence of the romantic spirit 
is that the artist, whatever his conception, is always aware of the 
infinite mysteries which lie beyond it. Mr. Cabot, in his biog- 



432 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

raphy of Emerson, described Transcendentalism as an out- 
break of romanticism. The romantic spirit is almost always 
transcendental. 

Now, even the stories of Irving are pervaded with one kind 
of romantic temper, — that which delights in the splendours 
of a vanished past, and in the mysteries of supernatural 
fancy. Something more deeply romantic underlies the 
inarticulate work of Brockden Brown, and still more the 
poems and the tales of Poe. Both Brown and Poe had a 
deep sense of what horror may lurk in the mysteries which 
always lie beyond human ken. Even Brown, however, and 
surely Poe conceived these melodramatically. Brown can 
sometimes thrill you; and Poe often ; but when you wake 
again to normal placidity, you find in your nostrils some lin- 
gering trace of such fumes as fill theatres where red lights have 
been burning. In common with Irving and Poe, Hawthorne 
had an instinctive tendency to something like classic precision 
of form. In common with them he possessed, too, a constant 
sensitiveness to the mysteries of romantic sentiment ; but the 
romanticism of Hawthorne differs from that of either Poe or 
Irving as distinctly as it differs from that of Brockden Brown. 
In Hawthorne's there is no trace of artificiality. Beyond 
human life he feels not only the fact of mystery ; he feels 
the mysteries which are truly there. 

In the mere fact of romantic temper, then, Hawthorne is 
broadly American, typically native to this new world which has 
been so starved of antiquity. In the fact that his romantic 
spirit is fundamentally true he proves individual, and more at 
one than our other artists with the deepest spirit of his pecu- 
liar country. The darkly passionate idealism of the Puritans 
had involved a tendency towards conceptions, which when 
they reached artistic form must be romantic. The phase of 
mystery on which the grim dogmas of these past generations 
incessantly dwelt lies in the world-old facts, which nothing 
shall ever much abate, of evil and sin and suffering. Now 



HA WTHORNE 433 

Hawthorne had passed so far beyond Puritan dogma that in 
mature life he could rarely be persuaded to attend a religious 
service. His temper, indeed, when not concerned with the 
forms of artistic expression, was impatient of all formality. 
Just as truly, however, as his nature was that of a born artist, 
it could never shake off the temperamental earnestness of the 
Puritan. Throughout his work, then, he is most characteristic 
when in endlessly varied form he expresses that constant, 
haunting sense of ancestral sin in which his Puritan forefathers 
found endless warrant for their doctrines of depravity and of 
eternal retribution. With the Puritans, of course, this sense 
of sin was a conviction of fact ; they believed in the Devil, 
whose essential wickedness, lurking within every human 
heart, is bound if we lack divine help to sweep us into 
deserved and lasting torment. Hawthorne, on the other 
hand, felt all this only as a matter of emotional experience. 
To him Puritanism was no longer a motive of life ; in final 
ripeness it had become a motive of art. When any human 
impulse has thus ripened, we may generally conclude it his- 
torically a thing of the past. 

Another aspect of this deep sense of sin and mystery shows 
us that it involves morbid development of conscience. Con- 
science in its artistic form Hawthorne displays throughout ; 
and though artistic conscience be very different from moral, 
the two have in common an aspiration toward beauty. For 
all its perversities of outward form, the impulse of the moral 
conscience is really toward beauty of conduct ; artistic con- 
science, often evident in works morally far from edifying, is a 
constant, strenuous impulse toward beauty of expression. In 
America this latter trait has generally seemed more frequent 
than in England ; one feels it even in Brockden Brown, one 
feels it strongly in Irving and Poe, one feels it in the dehcately 
sentimental lines of Bryant, and one feels it now and again 
through most of the expression of renascent New England. 
Whatever American writers have achieved, they have con- 



434 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

stantly tried to do their best. Hawthorne, we have seen, 
surpassed his countrymen in the genuineness of his artistic im- 
pulse; he surpassed them, too, in the tormenting strenuous- 
ness of his artistic conscience. In his choice of words and, 
above all, in the delicacy of his very subtle rhythm, he seems 
never to have relaxed his effort to write as beautifully as he 
could. He displays the ancestral conscience of New Eng- 
land, then, in finally exquisite form. 

Of course the man has limits. Comparing his work with 
the contemporary work of England, one is aware of its classi- 
cally careful form, of its profoundly romantic sentiment, and 
of its admirable artistic conscience. One grows aware, at the 
same time, of its unmistakable rusticity ; in turns of thought 
as well as of phrase one feels monotony, provincialism, a cer- 
tain thinness. Throughout, one feels again that tendency to 
shrink from things of the flesh which to some foreign minds 
makes all American writing seem either emasculate or hypo- 
critical. It is reported of Hawthorne, indeed, — who first saw 
Europe, we should remember, when he was nearly fifty years 
old, — that he could never reconcile his taste to the superbly 
unconscious nudities of masterly sculpture and painting. 
Here is an incalculable limit ; and he has plenty more. One 
and all of these limits, however, prove, like his merits, to be 
deeply characteristic of the New England which surrounded 
his life. 

It is hard to sum up the impression which such a writer 
makes. He was ideal, of course, in temper ; he was intro- 
spective, with all the self-searching instinct of his ancestry ; 
he was solitary ; he was permeated with a sense of the mys- 
teries of life and sin ; and by pondering over them he tended 
to exaggerate them more and more. In a dozen aspects, then, 
he seems typically Puritan. His artistic conscience, however, 
as alert as that of any pagan, impelled him constantly to real- 
ise in his work those forms of beauty which should most 
beautifully embody the ideals of his incessantly creative imagi- 



HAWTHORNE 435 

nation. Thus he grew to be of all our writers the least 
imitative, the most surely individual. The circumstances of 
his life combined with the sensitiveness of his nature to make 
his individuality indigenous. Beyond any one else, then, he 
expresses the deepest temper of that New England race 
which brought him forth, and which now, at least in the 
phases we have known, seems vanishing from the earth. 



XV 

. THE DECLINE OF NEW ENGLAND 

Among the numerous writers of the New England Renais- 
sance on whom we have not touched there were doubtless 
some who wrote significantly. The unconscious selection of 
the public, however, has preferred those on whom we have 
consequently found it worth our while to dwell. What is 
more, little was thought or said in nineteenth-century New 
England, and above all little was written there which will not 
fall under one or another of the heads which we have con- 
sidered. The earlier volumes of the "Atlantic," for example, 
taken with the " Dial " and the " North American Review," 
represent the literature of this period ; and although among the 
contributors to each you may find persons whom we have 
neglected, you will be at pains to find in any of them traces 
of any general spirit in the air with which our study has not 
now made us reasonably familiar. 

It is hard, too, quite to realise that we have been dealing 
not with the present but with the past. The days of the 
Renaissance are still so recent that plenty of Bostonians in- 
stinctively feel its most eminent figures to be our contempo- 
raries. As we begin to ponder over the group of our lately 
vanished worthies, however, the most obvious fact about them 
grows to seem that they represent a kind of eminence which 
no longer distinguishes New England. 

The social history of Boston, one begins to see, has been 
exceptional. Early in the reign of Charles II., Cotton 
Mather was born there. Living all his life in that remote 
colonial town, he managed, both as a man of science and as a 



THE DECLINE 437 

busy theological writer, to win European recognition. Any 
American, it is said, who went abroad during Cotton Mather's 
lifetime, was apt to be asked whether he knew this one 
American whose name had strayed beyond the limits of his 
country. Cotton Mather died in 1728, forty-eight years 
before the Declaration of Independence ; but he had been 
personally known to at least one distinguished signer of that 
document, Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, of course, lived 
little in Boston, and not at all after his early youth. During 
the middle half of the eighteenth century, then, one may 
perhaps say that Boston, although it contained men of unusual 
intelligence and power, contained few if any whose eminence 
was more than locally visible. By the time of the American 
Revolution, however, a leading citizen of Boston was John 
Adams, whose reputation as a public man ultimately became 
worldwide; and in the Boston of his day Adams's personality 
was not obviously exceptional. Though his attainment of the 
national presidency made him at last more conspicuous than 
any of his New England contemporaries, he was at home 
only one of an able and distinguished company. President 
Adams survived the Declaration of Independence by precisely 
half a century; he died on the 4th of July, 1826. At that 
time the Boston on which his eyes closed already contained 
many men not only of power, but of such eminence that at 
one time or another they attained far more than local recog- 
nition. John Quincy Adams, then President of the United 
States, was a diplomatist known throughout Europe. Daniel 
Webster and Edward Everett were members of Congress 
from Boston, George Ticknor was Smith Professor at Har- 
vard, William EUery Channing was in the very flood-tide of 
his career, and young Ralph Waldo Emerson was just being 
licensed to preach. 

The name of Emerson carries us to another literary epoch. 
In 1879, Holmes, in his Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, wrote 
of that Saturday Club at which we have already glanced : — 



438 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

" This Club, of which we were both members, and which is still 
flourishing, came into existence in a very quiet sort of way at about 
the same time as the ' Atlantic Monthly,' and although entirely un- 
connected with that magazine, included as members some of its chief 
contributors. Of those who might have been met at some of the 
monthly gatherings in its earlier days I may mention Emerson, Haw- 
thorne, Lowell, Longfellow, Motley, Whipple, Whittier; Professors 
Agassiz and Peirce ; John S. Dwight; Governor Andrew, Richard H. 
Dana, Junior, Charles Sumner. It offered a wide gamut of intelli- 
gences, and the meetings were noteworthy occasions. If there was 
not a certain amount of ' mutual admiration ' among some of those I 
have mentioned it was a great pity, and implied a defect in the nature 
of men who were otherwise largely endowed. The vitality of this 
Club has depended in a great measure on its utter poverty in statutes 
and by-laws, its entire absence of formality, and its blessed freedom 
from speech-making." 

In Mr. Morse's biography of Holmes there is a note refer- 
ring to this Club, in which he mentions among its members 
a number of other gentlemen still living and these among the 
dead : Felton, once President of Harvard College ; Prescott j 
Tom Appleton ; J. M. Forbes; Henry James, the elder; 
William Hunt, the painter ; Charles Francis Adams j Francis 
Parkman ; James Freeman Clarke ; Judge John Lowell ; 
Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar ; and Bishop Brooks. Including 
Holmes, this gives us twenty-six members of the Club, all 
typical Boston gentlemen of the Renaissance. Another mem- 
ber, we have already seen, was Fields. Twenty-seven names, 
then, we have mentioned in all, so carelessly collected that 
one so familiar as that of Fields was accidentally omitted. 
Among the six least widely known of the company, two had 
attained more than local reputation as men of letters. Edwin 
Percy Whipple was generally recognised as a professional 
literary critic ; and if Mr. Dana had lacked the claim to emi- 
nence which his admirable career at the bar deserved, and which 
was deserved as well by his high-minded devotion to the cause 
of antislavery at a time when such devotion demanded rare 
courage, he would still be remembered among our lesser lit- 
erary figures as the writer of that excellent record of sea-life. 



THE DECLINE 439 

" Two Years Before the Mast." President Felton and Tom 
Appleton and John Lowell, on the other hand, left behind 
them little literary record ; whoever knew them, however, 
must remember them as men of such wit and breeding as 
would have been exceptional anywhere ; and any memory 
which embraces them will embrace too the figure of Mr. 
■Forbes, a merchant of those elder days when mercantile 
Boston had something of the quality which tradition would 
confine to the old-world merchants who wore their swords. 

This list, we must remember, is merely accidental, — the list 
of a few men who chanced to become fellow-members of a 
small, intimate Club. In the Boston where they lived they 
were not the only men of eminence. Webster was their 
fellow-citizen ; so was Everett ; so was Choate ; so were 
Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips ; so was Mr. Win- 
throp. The list might extend indefinitely. Between 1840 
and i860, indeed, Boston was probably the spot in the Eng- 
lish-speaking world where in proportion to the population a 
visitor was most apt familiarly to meet men whose reputa- 
tion had extended as far as our language, amid fellow-citizens 
who seemed in all respects their equals. 

In January, 1893, there suddenly died at Boston the late 
Bishop of Massachusetts, the youngest man whose name is in- 
cluded in Mr. Morse's list of the Saturday Club. Phillips 
Brooks, born in 1835, and graduated at Harvard at the age of 
twenty, was early known throughout the English-speaking 
world as among the few great preachers of his day. Cotton 
Mather had reached his full maturity in 1700; in 1875 
Phillips Brooks was at the height of his powers ; and it is 
hardly too much to say that throughout those hundred and 
seventy-five years Boston had bred or had attracted to itself 
a succession of undeniably eminent men. To-day there has 
come a marked change. The city still possesses men of 
power, of breeding, of culture. Even a critic so little dis- 
posed to commendation as Mr. Godkin has lately mentioned 



440 777^ RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

Boston as the one place in America where wealth and the 
knowledge of how to use it are apt to coincide. Just as 
surely, however, as the Boston of 1850 was surprisingly rich 
in men of wide distinction, so the Boston of 1900 seems 
comparatively poor. 

Though this decline in the importance of Boston cannot 
yet be thoroughly accounted for, two or three facts about it 
are obvious. For one thing, as we have already seen, the 
intellectual Renaissance of New England coincided with its 
period of commercial prosperity ; this began with foreign com- 
merce, and soon passed into local manufactures and local rail- 
ways. During the first half of the nineteenth century, then, 
Boston was apparently the most prosperous city in America. 
Throughout this period, however, the prosperity of Boston 
never crystallised in what nowadays would be considered large 
fortunes. Up to the time of the Civil War, indeed, a Bosto- 
nian worth a million dollars was still held extremely rich. 
The great West, meanwhile, was untamed prairie and wilder- 
ness. 

The intellectual hegemony of Boston may roughly be said 
to have lasted until the Civil War. That great national con- 
vulsion affected the Northern States somewhat as an electric 
current affects temporarily isolated chemicals ; it flashed the 
Union into new cohesion. The wildest imagination of i860 
could hardly have conceived such centralised national power 
as in 1900 has become commonplace to American thought. 
One price which every separate region must pay for such 
national union is a decline of local importance. New Eng- 
land has never lost its integrity, but since the Civil War New 
England has counted for less and less. 

A few years after the Civil War the Pacific Railway was 
at last completed. Long before this, an extreme application of 
the policy of protection — a policy still strongly supported by the 
manufacturing interests of New England — had resulted in the 
disappearance of our foreign commerce. The opening of the 



THE DECLINE 44i 

continental transportation lines naturally stimulated that already 
great development of wheat-growing and the like which now 
makes our western prairies perhaps the chief grain-producing 
region of the world. Coal, and oil, too, and copper, and iron 
began to sprout like weeds. The centre of economic import- 
ance in America inevitably shifted westward. Meantime 
legislation had deprived New England of that mercantile 
marine which might conceivably have maintained its import- 
ance in international trade. 

Again, the immense development of Western wealth, dur- 
ing the past thirty' or forty years, has resulted in private for- 
tunes whose mere bulk is incredible. Though the fortunes 
of wealthy New Englanders have undoubtedly increased, they 
have increased in nothing like proportion with the fortunes of 
the West. Such a state of economic fact could not 
fail, at least for a while, to bring about a marked change in 
American ideals. The immigrant clergy of New England 
held such local power as involves personal eminence ; such 
power later passed into the hands of the bar; and during 
our Renaissance, literature itself carried with it influence 
enough to make great personal eminence its most stimulating 
prize. To-day, for better or worse, power and eminence 
throughout America have momentarily become questions 
rather of material fortune. 

External causes, then, would perhaps have brought to an 
end the eminence of New England ; but we can see now as 
well that in the form which our Renaissance took there was 
something which must have prevented it from lasting long. 
As we look back on it now, its most characteristic phase 
appears to have been that which began with Unitarianism, 
passed into Transcendentalism, and broke out into militant 
reform. All three of these movements, or, if you prefer, all 
these three phases of one considerable movement, were based 
on the fundamental conception that human beings are inher- 
ently good. This naturally involved the right of every individ'^ 



442 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

ual to think and to act as he chose. Free exercise of this 
right for a while seemed to uphold the buoyant philosophy 
on which it was based. So long as human beings were con- 
trolled by the discipline of tradition, their vagaries were not 
so wild as to seem socially disintegrating ; but before long, 
excessive individualism began evidently to involve the neglect 
and decay of standards. 

The most typical example of the whole tendency is prob- 
ably to be found in the history of Unitarianism. Fifty years 
ago this was certainly the dominant religious fact in Boston ; 
and the Unitarian ministers of the city were men of such 
vigorous and distinguished personality, of such ethereal moral 
purity, too, as made them seem the fit spiritual leaders of a 
society remarkable for personal distinction. To-day this elder 
Unitarianism has tended either to recoil into the Episcopal 
Church, or else to dissipate itself in the reformatory vagaries 
of free-thinking pulpits. The tenants of these, frequently 
foreigners, have often been admirable persons whose origin and 
manners have perceptibly differed from those of their distin- 
guished predecessors. More than one of the old Boston 
churches have meanwhile passed out of existence. The 
Brattle Street Church, which began its career of liberal Cal- 
vinism, under Benjamin Coleman, in the days of William and 
Mary, has totally disappeared ; so has the Hollis Street Church, 
memorable as that of " the celebrated Mather Byles ; " so has 
the West Church, where the father of James Russell Lowell 
used to preach ; so have more still. Nor is this wilting 
shrinkage merely a question of bricks and mortar. For a 
century and a half, until the dawn of Unitarianism, the pul- 
pits of Boston were incessantly occupied by the most distin- 
guished and powerful men of New England ; to-day, after 
less than a hundred years of the work begun by Channing, 
the Boston pulpit, whatever the individual merits of its clergy, 
has locally become the least conspicuous and the least influen- 
tial in America. 



THE DECLINE 443 

Along with this impressive change in New England has 
come another. Towards the end of his life, Bishop Brooks 
chanced to be privately talking of the difference between the 
Harvard College of his boyhood and the Harvard College to 
which, under the enfranchised system of non-sectarian religion 
which now prevails there, he was an official preacher. " In 
my time," he said, " Harvard students had poets ; now they 
have n't." The truth is, one begins to see, that the old 
poets, whom the young Yankees used so enthusiastically to 
read, phrased one single old ideal, — that spirit of revolution 
whose aim is individual freedom. Intellectually and spirit- 
ually, that ideal has now come as near realisation as is ever 
the case on earth. Boston men, at present of mature years, 
have grown up in a generation whose individual freedom was 
ready to be used and enjoyed. Born under the influences for 
which the preceding generation had fought, then, this new 
generation has generally been content to cherish each his 
own individual ideal, which has usually been too individual 
to excite common enthusiasm. 

An unremarked accident in merely literary history has mean- 
while had perceptible effect on New England. The men who 
started the " North American Review," the later men who for 
a while expressed themselves in the " Dial," and later still the 
men whose work was finally concentrated in the " Atlantic 
Monthly " had one point in common, which they shared with 
the orators, the scholars, and the Unitarians who flourished 
along with them. Almost all these men either had been edu- 
cated at Harvard College or else had early come under the 
influences of that oldest seat of American learning. How 
deeply coherent the Harvard spirit has always been may be felt 
by whoever will read that long series of occasional poems in 
which Dr. Holmes celebrated the history of the college and of 
the class of '29. Until Mr, Fields became editor of the 
" Atlantic Monthly," then, the chief vehicles of literary 
expression in New England were controlled by men in whom 



444 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

this Harvard tradition was inbred. Though not a college man, 
Mr. Fields was in close and intimate sympathy with the col- 
lege men of his day. The gentlemen who succeeded him in 
control of the " Atlantic Monthly " are still living, are eminent 
in contemporary letters, and are worthily respected and admired 
by whoever knows them either personally or as authors. 
Neither of them, however, had chanced to have much to do 
with Harvard ; nor had either, during his days of editorship, 
instinctive sympathy with Harvard character. For years, then, 
the New England youth who came to Harvard with literary 
aspiration found themselves at odds with the conscientious and 
admirable men of letters who controlled the chief organ of 
New England literature. The " Atlantic Monthly " ceased 
to understand the constituency from which its older contribu- 
tors had been drawn ; and Harvard College ceased perceptibly 
to affect the literature of New England. 

The college itself was somewhat to blame. The spirit of 
individualism had more than done its work there. In the 
opening paper of the " Autocrat of the Breakfast Table " 
Holmes launches into a characteristically whimsical and wise 
discussion of societies of mutual admiration: — 

" What would our literature or art be without such associations ? 
Who can tell what we owe to the Mutual Admiration Society of which 
Shakspere, and Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher were mem- 
bers? . . . Or to that where Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Burke, and 
Reynolds, and Beauclerk, and Boswell, most admiring among all 
admirers, met together? Was there any great harm in the fact that 
the Irvings and Paulding wrote in company? or any unpardonable 
cabal in the literary union of Verplanck and Bryant and Sands, and as 
many more as they chose to associate with them ? " 

Whatever its disintegrant tendencies, the society of the Boston 
Renaissance was full of mutual admiration ; and the Saturday 
Club, in which the social side of Boston literature culminated, 
was a Mutual Admiration Society of the most stimulating 
kind. The extreme individualism of the later generation has 
made such mutual admiration seem incompatible with honest 



THE DECLINE 445 

criticrsm. The younger men of Harvard have not only lacked 
common ideals ; they have so far parted one from another 
that they have been honestly unable to perceive what virtues 
they may have possessed in common as distinguished from 
what faults an overdeveloped critical perception has revealed 
to each in the temper and the work of the others. 

And so the Renaissance of New England has declined. 
At least for the moment literary New England is a thing 
of the past. What the future may bring, no man can say ; 
but we are already far enough from the New England which 
was considerable in letters to ask what it has contributed 
to human expression. 

Not much, we must answer, on any large scale ; of the 
men we have scrutinised only two, Emerson and Hawthorne, 
will generally be held considerably to have enriched the litera- 
ture of our language. And Emerson has vagaries which may 
well justify a doubt whether his work is among those few final 
records of human wisdom which are imperishable Scriptures. 
Beyond doubt, again, though Hawthorne's tales possess sin- 
cerity of motive and beauty of form, they reveal at best a 
phase of human nature whose limits are obvious. Mutual 
admiration has combined with such limits to make New Eng- 
land overestimate itself; and for want of anything better to 
brag about, all America has bragged about the letters of New 
England, until in reactionary moods one begins to smile at the 
brag. As we look back at the Renaissance now vanishing into 
the past, however, we find in it, if not positive magnitude of 
achievement, at least qualities which go far to warrant this 
national pride which we have loved to believe justified. For 
in every aspect its literature is sincere and pure and sweet. 

The emigrants to New England were native Elizabethans, 
— stern and peculiar, but still temperamentally contemporary 
with Shakspere and the rest. In two centuries and a half, 
national experience forced English life and letters through 
many various phases, until at last the old country began to 



446 THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

breed that fixed, conservative John Bull vi^ho has so lost 
Elizabethan spontaneity, versatility, and enthusiasm. In 
America, meantime, national inexperience kept the elder 
temper little changed until at the beginning of the nineteenth 
century it was aroused by the vi^orld-movement of revolu- 
tion. Then, at last, our ancestral America, v^^hich had so un- 
wittingly lingered behind the mother country, awoke. In the 
flush of its waking, it strove to express the meaning of life; 
and the meaning of its life was the story of what two hundred 
years of national inexperience had wrought for a race of 
Elizabethan Puritans. Its utterances may well prove lacking 
in scope, in greatness ; the days to come may well prove 
them of little lasting potence ; but nothing can obscure their 
beautiful purity of spirit. 

For all its inexperience, New England life has been human. 
Its literal records are no more free than those of other regions 
and times from the greed and the lust, the trickery and the 
squalor, which everywhere defile earthly existence. What 
marks it apart is the childlike persistency of its ideals. Its 
nobler minds, who have left their records in its literature, 
retained something of the old spontaneity, the old versatiHty, 
the old enthusiasm of ancestral England. They retained, 
too, even more than they knew of that ardour for absolute 
truth which animated the grave fathers of the emigration. 
Their innocence of worldly wisdom led them to undue con- 
fidence in the excellence of human nature ; the simplicity of 
their national past blinded them to the complexity of the days 
even now at hand, while the sod still lies light on their graves. 
We used to beUeve them heralds of the future j already we 
begin to perceive that they were rather chroniclers of times 
which shall be no more. Yet, after all, whatever comes, they 
possessed traits for which we may always give them unstinted 
reverence ; for humanity must always find inspiring the record 
of bravely confident aspiration toward righteousness. 



BOOK VI 
THE REST OF THE STORY 



BOOK VI 

THE REST OF THE STORY 
I 

NEW YORK SINCE 1 85 7 

Long as we have dwelt on the Renaissance of New England, 
we can hardly have forgotten that the first considerable 
American literary expression developed in the Middle States. 
Before New England emerged into literature, the work of 
Brockden Brown had been completed and the reputations 
of Irving and Cooper and Bryant established. Bryant, as 
we have seen, lived through the whole period which brought 
New England letters to their height and to their decline. 
He outlived Poe, he outlived Willis, and long before he died 
the Knickerbocker School had passed into a memory. Mean- 
while those writers whose works had centred about the 
" Atlantic Monthly " had achieved their full reputation. 

The " Atlantic Monthly," we remember, was started in 
1857. That same year saw also the foundation of "Harper's 
Weekly," which still admirably persists in New York. 
At that time " Harper's Monthly Magazine " had been in 
existence for seven years ; and the two New York newspapers 
which have maintained closest relation with literary matters, 
the " Evening Post " and the " Tribune," had long been 
thoroughly established. The other periodicals which now 
mark New York as the literary centre of the United States 
were not yet founded. In reverting to New York, then, 
we may conveniently revert to 1857. 

29 



450 THE REST OF THE STORY 

Though the fact by which this year is commonly remem- 
bered in American history has left no mark on literature, we 
may conveniently remind ourselves that throughout America 
1857 ^^^ marked by a memorable financial panic. The 
great expansion of the country during the preceding twelve 
or fifteen years had resulted in a general extension of credit 
and in a general overdevelopment of enterprises, particularly 
of railroads, which were bound to involve reaction. For 
a little while the material progress of the country came to a 
standstill. It was only when this material progress was re- 
newed, partly under the stimulus of the Civil War, that the 
overwhelming superiority of New York as a centre of material 
prosperity made itself finally felt. Throughout the century, 
to be sure, the preponderance of New York had been declar- 
ing itself. In 1800 it had 60,000 inhabitants to only 24,000 
in Boston. In 1830, when it had 200,000 inhabitants, 
Boston had only 61,000; and by 1857 *^^ population of 
New York was at least three-quarters of a million, while that 
of Boston still proportionally lagged behind. From the time 
when the Erie Canal was opened, in fact, the geographical 
position of New York had already made that city by far the 
most considerable in America. Less than three hundred 
miles from Boston, it was and it remains geographically as 
central as Boston is isolated. 

Until after the Civil War, however, the preponderating 
importance of New York had not proceeded so far as to 
deprive the place of a decided local character. Traces of 
this, indeed, it still retains ; but most of its modern character- 
istics seem traceable to a political accident. Throughout the 
period during which its geographical position, at first slowly, 
then faster and faster, has declared its commercial superiority, 
New York has never been a political capital. In this respect 
its contrast with Boston is most marked. Though Boston 
has been the capital only of the small State of Massachusetts, 
this small State has always been the most important of 



NEW YORK SINCE 1857 45 1 

isolated New England. Boston, then, its political capital, 
has enjoyed not only the commercial and economic supremacy 
of the region, but also such supremacy as comes from attract- 
ing and diffusing the most important influences of local public 
life. In this aspect Boston on a small scale resembles the 
great capitals of the world. New York, on the other hand, 
commercially and financially the most important spot in 
America, has never been much else. Almost from the 
beginning our national government has been centralised in 
Washington, — a city artificially created for political pur- 
poses at a point of small economic importance. The gov- 
ernment of the State of New York, ever since New York 
was a State, has been situated at the comparatively insignifi- 
cant town of Albany. The enormous growth of New York 
City, to be sure, has long given it great political weight. In 
current political slang there are few more picturesque phrases 
than that which describes some candidate for the Presi- 
dency of the United States as coming down to the Harlem 
River with a considerable majority, to be met at that traditional 
boundary of the metropolis by an overwhelming force of 
metropolitan voters. In point of fact, however, metropolitan 
New York has always had to seek legislation from a much 
smaller city more than a hundred miles, away ; and thither it 
has always had to take for decision every question carried to 
its court of highest appeal. Two natural results which have 
followed may be paralleled in various other American cities 
similarly placed, — Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, or San 
Francisco. In the absence of far-reaching political activity, 
emphasis on merely local politics has been disproportionate ; 
and meanwhile the city, which has prospered only from such 
preponderatingly material causes, has appeared excessively 
material in general character. 

Throughout this century of material development, then, 
New York has lacked some of those advantages which make 
a true capital intellectually stimulating. Its extraordinary 



452 THE REST OF THE STORY 

growth has nevertheless brought into being there something 
more like metropolitan life than has yet existed elsewhere in 
America. Any one whose memory of New York extends 
back for thirty years can personally recall changes there which 
prove by no means superficial. 

The New York of the '6o's was little changed from 
that of 1857 ; y°" ^^^^ there traces of old local character 
quite as marked as you would feel to-day in Boston or 
Philadelphia. How the New York, of to-day might present 
itself to a European, one can hardly say. To any American 
the change has become something more than the growth of 
the old Dutch and English town into that endless extent of 
towering commercial buildings, of palaces, and of slums, 
which now begins to count its population by the million. 
What the visitor from New England most feels in modern 
New York is its metropolitan character. In many aspects, 
of course, the city remains American ; in many others it 
seems chiefly a great centre of world-life. Nowhere before 
on this continent have human beings and human energy so 
concentrated ; never before has life become so little local, so 
broadly general. With all its differences from the great cities 
of the old world, you begin to feel that to-day it has more 
in common with London and Paris, with Vienna and Berlin, 
with old Rome and Babylon, and all the rest, than with 
ancestral America. 

Very material this development, of course ; and from the 
accident that New York is not a true capital, its materialism 
has been more and more emphasised. On such a scale as this 
however, material development cannot help involving intellec- 
tual activity. In world-centres life becomes more and more 
strenuous. The problems before individuals grow more com- 
plicated, the rewards larger. The scale of everything in- 
creases. If you have things to sell, there you can find most 
buyers ; if you would buy things, there you can find most who 
have things to sell. So if as an artist you have things that 



NEW YORK SINCE 1857 453 

you would impart to other men, there you can surely find the 
greatest number of men to whom they may be imparted. If 
by chance what you do in such a place is worth doing, its 
effect will be wider and greater than anything done amid the 
smaller, less disturbing influences of isolation. While New 
York has been developing its material prosperity, then, it has 
also been developing higher life. From the moment when 
the Renaissance of New England began to decline, New York 
has more and more certainly been growing into the intellec- 
tual and artistic centre of America. 

For many years our principal publishers have been centred 
there \ so have the periodicals which are most generally read 
throughout the country. There is " Harper's Magazine," 
which dates from 1850 ; "Harper's Weekly," which dates 
from 1857 ; ^^ " Century Magazine," founded as " Scribner's 
Monthly" in 1870, and translated to its present name in 1881 ; 
"Scribner's Magazine," founded in 1887; and more. Some 
twenty years ago the old "North American Review" was bought 
by New York people and its title transferred there to a peri- 
odical of less staid character than the conventional old quarterly 
so dear to New England tradition. In New York, too, there 
has been published since 1865 the chief American weekly 
paper which has seriously discussed public and literary affairs, 
" The Nation ; " and there are comic weeklies as well, — ■ 
" Puck " and " Life," and more. The list might go on end- 
lessly ; but for our purposes this is enough. The extent of 
literary activity involved in such production is incalculably 
greater than New England ever dreamed of. 

All the same, this activity has been distinguished from the 
literary activity of renascent New England in two rather 
marked ways. The first is that, in spite of its magnitude, it is 
less conspicuous in New York than the old " North American 
Review " or even the " Dial," and still more than the earlier 
volumes of the " Atlantic Monthly " were in their contempo- 
rary Boston. As one looks back at Boston between 1800 and 



454 THE REST OF THE STORY 

1864, one inclines to feel that its intellectual life was rather 
more important than its material, and that even on the spot 
this intellectual importance was appreciated. In New York, 
however important our contemporary literary expression, mate- 
rial activity is more important still. The second way in which 
literary New York may be distinguished from our elder literary 
Boston results from the first ; it was typified by an incident at a 
New York dinner-party eight or ten years ago. A Bostonian, 
in some small degree a man of letters, was invited to meet a 
company of literary New Yorkers. In the course of conver- 
sation one of the company happened casually to mention that 
he was in editorial charge of a well-known magazine. The 
visitor from New England laughingly confessed that he had no 
idea that his neighbour held so distinguished an office. This 
provincial ignorance so amused the company that they pro- 
ceeded to ask their visitor to name the editors of the familiar 
periodicals on which we have already touched, — "Harper's 
Magazine," " Harper's Weekly," the " Century Magazine," 
" Scribner's Magazine," and the rest. The Bostonian, who 
knew all these publications perfectly well, had never known 
who conducted any of them. The only New York editorial 
fact about which he was certain was that Mr. Godkin had 
something to do with the " Nation." Though such ignorance 
was by no means to the credit of the Bostonian, it clearly in- 
dicates a truth concerning contemporary letters in New York. 
To a degree previously unprecedented in America, they have 
become impersonal. You know the names of publishers, you 
know the names of magazines, but in general you have misty 
notions of who is writing. 

Yet New York has not lacked literary worthies. At vari- 
ous times, for example, while considering the literature of New 
England, we have had occasion to notice Horace Greeley, the 
founder of the " New York Tribune." Not precisely a man 
of letters, unless within the range of letters you include regular 
journalism, Greeley had marked influence on literature in New 



NEW YORK SINCE 1857 455 

York. A country boy from New Hampshire, a printer by 
trade, he arrived there, carrying all his worldly goods in a bundle, 
during the month of August, 1831. After various journalistic 
experiments, he established the " Tribune " just ten years later ; 
from that time on he was more and more recognised as a re- 
markably individual journalist. He was a somewhat grotesque 
combination of simplicity and shrewdness, thoroughly honest 
and sincerely devoted to all manner of reform. Naturally, 
then, he warmly sympathised with many of the New England 
men at whom we have glanced. At one time or another he 
invited their co-operation with the " Tribune ; " his influence 
brought to New York a number of memorable literary people. 
Charles Anderson Dana passed by way of the " Tribune " from 
Brook Farm to the " New York Sun ; " and George William 
Curtis wrote long for the " Tribune " before he finally became 
associated with the periodicals of the Harpers. For a year or 
two Margaret Fuller was in charge of the "Tribune's" literary 
criticism ; she was followed by George Ripley, who continued 
the work all his life. Nor did the " Tribune " draw its literary 
strength only from New England. Henry Jarvis Raymond, 
founder of the New York " Times," was previously an assis- 
tant editor of the elder newspaper. The list of familiar names 
might extend indefinitely. However long or short, it would 
certainly include the name of Bayard Taylor, whose career 
fairly represents the condition of New York letters during the 
period now under consideration. 

Bayard Taylor was a Pennsylvanian, born of Quaker par- 
entage in 1825. He had only a common-school education, 
but he loved literature, and by the time he was sixteen years 
old he was publishing poems in local newspapers. At nineteen 
he had attracted the attention of Mr. Griswold, whose " Poets 
of America " and the Hke were once the chief American an- 
thologies ; and, besides, he had been associated with Greeley in 
one of the journalistic ventures which preceded the successful 
"Tribune." So, in 1844, Taylor brought out a volume of 



456 THE REST OF THE STORY 

poems ; and in the same year he was commissioned by the 
" Tribune " to go abroad and write home letters of travel. 
He spent two years in strolling through Europe on foot. 
The records of this journey began those books of travel which 
he continued publishing for thirty years. Meanwhile he gave 
lectures, wrote for the " Tribune," brought out many volumes 
of poems and novels, and in 1871 published a translation of 
Goethe's " Faust " in the original metres. An elaborate life 
of Goethe, which he had planned, was fatally prevented. 
Appointed Minister to Germany by President Hayes, he died 
soon after his arrival at Berlin, in December, 1878. 

Early in middle life Bayard Taylor had unquestionably at- 
tained such literary eminence as is involved in having one's 
name generally known. The limits of this eminence, however, 
appeared even while he was alive ; if you asked people what 
he had written, the chances were that they could not tell. 
He was a traveller, of course, and they either artlessly admired 
the fact that he had visited almost every accessible country, 
or else recalled the unkind epigram that Bayard Taylor had 
travelled more and seen less than anybody else on earth. This 
ill-natured criticism had the sting of partial truth. Taylor's 
accounts of his journeyings are just about as instructive and 
amusing as those lectures illustrated by stereopticon views which 
have supplanted the earlier traditions of Yankee Lyceums. He 
was enthusiastic and untiring, but he was not a keen observer. 
Flourishing rather before the days of guide-books, he saw per- 
ceptibly less than he would have seen if in possession of a modern 
Baedeker, and he remarked nothing whatever to which Bae- 
deker would not have called his starred attention. He pre- 
served, however, an enthusiastic simplicity of unspoiled feeling 
which proved very sympathetic to the middle classes of America. 
So his books of travel stimulated sluggish, untrained imagina- 
tions, and at worst only bored people of more gifts or training. 

These were his best-known writings. To him, however, 
they probably appeared little better than hackwork, things 



NEW YORK SINCE i8s7 AS7 

which he was compelled to manufacture for self-support. 
His ambition was to make a great poem. In view of this 
there is something pathetic in the list of forgotten titles which 
he has left us : " Ximena," his first volume, was published in 
1841 ; and after 1870, during the last six years of his busy 
life, he produced the " Masque of the Gods," and " Lars," and 
the " Prophet," and the " National Ode," and " Prince 
Deukalion." Here is a passage from the opening scene of 
that dreary drama, where an awakening shepherd hears a chorus 
of nymphs interrupted by underground voices : — 

"Nymphs. 
" We wait in the breezes, 
We hide in the vapours, 
And linger in echoes, 
Awaiting recall. 

" Voices. 
" The word is spoken, let the judgment fall! 

" Nymphs. 
" The heart of the lover, 
The strings of the psalter. 
The shapes in the marble 
Our passing deplore. 

"Voices. 
" Truth comes, and vanity shall be no more ! 

" Nymphs. 
" Not wholly we vanish ; 
The souls of the children, 
The faith of the poets 

Shall seek us, and find. 

"Voices. 
" Dead are the things the world has left behind. 

" Nymphs. 
" Lost beauty shall haunt you 
With tender remorses ; 
And out of its exile 
The passion return. 

" Voices. 
" The flame shall purify, the fire shall burn ! 



458 THE REST OF THE STORY 

From boyhood Taylor had travelled, and had written, and 
had read poetry, and had tried to be a poet ; and he certainly 
made something which looks poetic. As surely, however, as 
his verse never touched the popular heart, so his supreme 
literary effort never much appealed to those who seriously 
love poetry. 

His most meritorious work, in fact, is his translation of 
" Faust." He put before himself the task of reproducing the 
original metres, and so far as possible the original rhymes of 
that extremely complex poem. The result in nowise re- 
sembles normal English ; but he never undertook to turn 
" Faust " into an English poem ; his object was rather to 
reproduce in English words the effect made upon his mind by 
prolonged, sympathetic, enthusiastic study of the German 
masterpiece. Whatever the positive value of his translation, 
he achieved one rare practical result. By simply comparing 
his work with Goethe's original, persons who know very little 
German can feel the power and beauty of Goethe's style, as 
well as of his meaning. If in years to come Taylor's memory 
survives, then, it will probably be for this achievement in which 
he made no attempt at originality. His career was honourable, 
but not brilliant, nor yet distinguished in the sense in which 
we found so our elder literature. 

Another man who flourished in New York at about the 
same time, and lived there all his life, was Mr. Richard Grant 
White. After trying the pulpit, medicine, and the bar in turn, 
he settled down, before he was twenty-five years old, as a 
professional critic. His experience and training were mostly 
journalistic ; for fourteen years he was connected with a New 
York paper called the " Courier and Inquirer." With little 
other equipment he attempted two kinds of work which for 
excellence require severe scholarship. He produced an edition 
of Shakspere ; and he published two or three books on the 
English language. As editor and philologist, Mr. White was 
intelligent, clever, and eccentrically dogmatic. His quasi- 



NEW YORK SINCE 1857 459 

scholarly writings are always interesting, and never quite 
authoritative. In the New York where he flourished, how- 
ever, he enjoyed the reputation of a ripe scholar. He had a 
fondness meanwhile for anonymous writing ; so for some 
time he was not recognised as the author of what now appears 
to be his most remarkable work. This was the " New Gos- 
pel of Peace," a satire made during the most critical period 
of the Civil War. In burlesque scriptural style, it attacked 
that school of Northern poHtical thought, popularly called 
Copperhead, which denied the constitutional right of the Fed- 
eral Government to maintain the Union by force. The 
satire, which still seems powerful, is said to have converted 
waverers. In all this there is something characteristic of the 
confused New York we now have in mind. A clever and 
versatile critical journalist, who sincerely and ardently assumed 
the authority of a professionally trained scholar, came nearest 
to success in an irreverent political satire. Mr. White died in 
1885. 

Another conspicuous figure in New York literature, equally 
different from Taylor and from White, was Dr. Josiah Gilbert 
Holland. He was born in 18 19 in western Massachusetts. 
He took his medical degree at a small college in Pittsfield ; he 
was a contributor to the " Knickerbocker Magazine ; " he was 
for a time Superintendent of Public Schools in Missouri ; and 
in 1849 he became editor of the "Springfield Republican" in 
Massachusetts. With this paper he retained his connection 
for seventeen years, at the end of which, partly through his 
shrewd agency, the " Springfield Republican " had become 
probably the most influential American newspaper published 
outside of New York. In 1870 he became editor of " Scrib- 
ner's Monthly," which later took the name of the " Cen- 
tury," and of which he remained in charge until his death in 
1888. Dr. Holland was not only a respectable and successful 
journalist, but a welcome lecturer on various social topics, and 
the writer of numerous books. Among these were a popular 



460 THE REST OF THE STORY 

"Life of Lincoln," published in 1865, and three or four 
novels which had considerable success. His most character- 
istic writings, however, were didactic essays, the most success- 
ful of which were the series entitled " Timothy Titcomb's 
Letters to Young People." Others were called " Lessons in 
Life," " Letters to the Joneses," and " Plain Talks on 
Familiar Subjects." 

Here is a stray passage from this last : — 

" I account the loss of a man's life and individuality, through the 
non-adaptation or the mal-adaptation of his powers to his pursuits, the 
greatest calamity, next to the loss of personal virtue, that he can suffer 
in this world. I believe that a full moiety of the trials and disappoint- 
ments that darken a world which, I am sure, was intended to be 
measurably bright and happy, are traceable to this prolific source. 
Men are not in their places. Women are not in their places. John is 
doing badly the work that William would do well, and William is do- 
ing badly the work that John would do well; and both are dis- 
appointed and unhappy, and self-unmade. It is quite possible that 
John is doing Mary's work and Mary is doing John's work. 

" ' Of all sad words of tongue or pen. 

The saddest are these : " it might have been.'" 

" Now, I do not suppose that we shall ever get the world all right on 
this matter. I do not suppose that all men will find the places for 
which they were designed, or that, in many instances, Maud will marry 
the Judge ; but an improvement can be made ; and if au improvement 
ever shall be made, it will be through the inculcation of sounder views 
among the young." 

The reverent way in which he quotes the very worst rhyme 
in which Whittier ever imbedded a commonplace, and then 
alludes to Maud Muller and her Judge as if they were equally 
immortal with the Bible, typifies that sort of commonplace 
which made Dr. Holland dear to less cultivated people. It is 
saved from indignity by its apparent unconsciousness of limita- 
tion. A similar quality pervaded his verse, some of which is 
preserved by Stedman and Hutchinson. His honesty, his 
kindness, and his sound moral sense endeared him to the 
general public, and in their own way did much to strengthen 



NEW YORK SINCE 18^7 461 

the homely principles of our level country. He sold 
thousands of volumes, he lived honourably, and he died 
respected. 

Another writer, somevs^hat similar in general character, but 
less versatile, was the Reverend Edward Payson Roe, born in 
New York State in 1838, for a while a student at Williams 
College, a volunteer chaplain during the Civil War, and after- 
wards a Presbyterian minister at Highland Falls, New York. 
In 1872 he published a novel called " Barriers Burned Away " 
which proved so successful that he gave up the ministry, and 
settling down in a small town on the Hudson River produced 
a steady stream of novels until his death in 1888. Whit- 
comb's "Chronological Outlines of American Literature" 
record the titles of nineteen of them. They are said to have 
had extraordinary popular success. They did nobody any 
harm ; and their general literary quality and power of doing 
good already seem inconsiderable. 

There have been many other writers in New York mean- 
while, but few of much eminence who are not still alive. Of 
one, who died not long ago, the promise seemed more than 
usual. Henry Cuyler Bunner, for years editor of " Puck," 
was so busy a journalist that only persistent effort allowed him 
time for any but his regular work. The verses and the stories 
which he has left us, then, are only a fragment of what might 
have been, had he had more leisure, or had he been spared 
beyond the early middle life when unhappily his career ended. 
Throughout this apparently ephemeral work, however, there is 
a touch so sympathetic, so sensitive, so winning, that there 
seems a peculiar fitness in his enduring monument. The 
chief literary prize at Columbia College, the chief seat 
of learning in his native city, is one lately founded in his 
memory. 

Of all these writers, and of the scores more who wrote at 
the same time, and most of whom are writing to-day, the 
volumes of Stedman and Hutchinson will give some Impres- 



462 THE REST OF THE STORY 

sion. In former times Griswold and Duyckinck made simi- 
lar collections of literature in American. As we have seen, 
both alike properly included many names for which Stedman 
and Hutchinson have found no room. It is hard to resist 
the conclusion that whoever shall make a new library of 
American literature, thirty or forty years hence, will by the 
same token find no place for many of our contemporaries mo- 
mentarily preserved by our latest anthologists. As you turn 
their pages, you can hardly avoid feeling that, however valua- 
ble these may be as history, they contain little which merits 
permanence. 

Depressing as this may at first seem to patriotic spirit, it 
has another aspect. As we look back on the literary records 
of New England, we can perceive in its local history a trait 
like one which has marked those more fortunate regions of 
the old world whose expression has proved lasting. Artistic 
expression is apt to be the final fruit of a society about to 
wither. For generations, or perhaps for centuries, traditions 
grow until they reach a form which locally distinguishes the 
spot which has developed them from any other in the world. 
Then, at moments of change, there sometimes arises, in a race 
about to pass from the living, a mysterious impulse to make 
plastic or written records of what the past has meant. These 
are what render even Greece and Italy and Elizabethan Eng- 
land more than mere names. So one gradually grows to feel 
that only the passing of old New England made its literature 
possible. The great material prosperity of New York, mean- 
while, has attracted thither during the past forty years count- 
less numbers of energetic people from all over the world, — 
foreigners. New Englanders, Westerners, Southerners, and 
whomever else. In this immigrant invasion the old New York 
of Irving and Cooper and the rest has been swallowed up. 
There is now hardly a city in the world where you are so 
little apt to meet people whose families have lived there for 
three successive generations. Our new metropolis, in fact, is 



NEW YORK SINCE 1857 4^3 

not only far from such a stage of decline as should mark the 
beginning of its passage from life to history, but it has not 
even formed the tangible traditions which may by and by 
define its spiritual character. 

What its features may finally be, then, we may only guess. 
On the whole, one inclines to guess hopefully. Beneath its 
bewildering material activity there is a greater vitality, a greater 
alertness, and in some aspects a greater wholesomeness, of in- 
telligence than one is apt to find elsewhere. It is not that the 
artists and the men of letters who live there have done work 
which even on our American scale may be called great. It is 
not that these men, or men who shall soon follow them, may be 
expected to make lasting monuments. It is rather that about 
them surges, with all its fluctuating good and evil, the irresistible 
tide of world-existence. The great wealth of New York and 
its colossal material power, of course, involve a social complex- 
ity, and at least a superficial corruption, greater than America 
has hitherto known ; and the men who live amid this bustling 
turmoil are habitually in contact with base things. Yet hun- 
dreds of them, sound at heart, think and speak with a buoyant 
courage which, even to a New Englander, seems almost youth- 
fully to preserve that fresh simplicity of heart so characteristic 
of our ancestrally inexperienced America. You may shake 
your head at them, or smile, as much as you will ; they impart 
to you, despite yourself, a mood of inexplicably brighter hope- 
fulness than their words, or the facts which those words set 
forth, seem to justify. 

So, very generally, we may say that our Middle States, as 
they used to be called, are now dominated by New York. 
This town, whose domination for the moment is not only 
local but almost national, owes its predominance to that out- 
burst of material force which throughout the victorious North 
followed the period of the Civil War. What may come of 
it no one can tell. Of the past and the present there is little 
to remark beyond what we have remarked already. There is. 



464 THE REST OF THE STORY 

however, one exception. The Middle States, and to a great 
degree the city of New York itself, have produced just one 
eccentric literary figure, who has emerged into an isola- 
tion which is sometimes believed eminent. This is Walt 
Whitman. 



WALT WHITMAN 

Walt Whitman was older than one is apt to remember. 
He was born on Long Island in 1819, and he died in 1892. 
His life, then, was almost exactly contemporary with Lowell's. 
No two lives could have been much more different in condition. 
Lowell, the son of a minister, closely related to the best people 
of New England, lived all his life amid the gentlest academic 
and social influences in America. Whitman was the son of a 
carpenter and builder on the outskirts of Brooklyn ; the only 
New England man of letters equally humble in origin was 
Whittier. 

The contrast between Whitman and Whittier, however, is 
almost as marked as that between Whitman and Lowell. 
Whittier, the child of Quaker farmers in the Yankee country, 
grew up and lived almost all his life amid guileless influences. 
Whitman, born of the artisan class in a region close to the 
most considerable and corrupt centre of population on his 
native continent, had a rather vagrant youth and manhood. At 
times he was a printer, at times a school-master, at times 
editor of stray country newspapers, and by and by he took up 
his father's trade of carpenter and builder, erecting a number 
of small houses in his unlovely native region. Meanwhile he, 
had rambled about the country and into Canada, in much the 
temper of those wanderers whom we now call tramps; but 
in general until past thirty years old, he was apt to be within 
scent of the East River. The New York of which his er- 
ratic habits thus made the lower aspects so familiar to him 
was passing, in the last days of the Knickerbocker School, into 

30 



466 THE REST OF THE STORY 

its metropolitan existence. The first edition of "Whitman's 
" Leaves of Grass" appeared in 1855, the year which pro- 
duced the " Knickerbocker Gallery." 

During the Civil War he served devotedly as an army 
nurse. After the war, until 1873, he held some small govern- 
ment clerkships at Washington. In 1873 a Paralytic stroke 
brought his active life to an end ; for his last twenty years he 
lived an invalid at a little house in Camden, New Jersey. 

Until 1855, when the first edition of " Leaves of Grass" 
appeared in a thin folio, some of which he set up with his own 
hands. Whitman had not declared himself as a man of letters. 
From that time to the end he was constantly publishing his 
eccentric poetry, which from time to time he collected in in- 
creasing bulk under the old title. He published, too, some 
stray volumes of prose, — " Democratic Vistas," and the like. 
Prose and poetry alike seem permeated with a conviction that 
he had a mission to express and to extend the spirit of democ- 
racy, which he believed characteristic of his country. To 
himself, then, he seemed the inspired prophet of an America 
which he asserted to be above all things else the land of the 
people j few men have ever cherished a purpose more literally 
popular. His fate has been ironic. Though even in his life- 
time he became conspicuous, it is doubtful whether any man 
of letters in his country ever appealed less to the masses. 
He was a prophet of democracy, if you like ; but the public to 
which his prophecy made its way was at once limited, fas- 
tidiously overcultivated, and apt to be of foreign birth. 

Beyond question Whitman had remarkable individuality and 
power. Equally beyond question he was among the most 
eccentric individuals who ever put pen to paper. The natural 
result of this has been that his admirers have admired him in- 
tensely j while whoever has found his work repelleht has found 
it irritating. Particularly abroad, however, he has attracted 
much critical attention ; and many critics have been disposed 
to maintain that his amorphous prophecies of democracy are 



WALT WHITMAN ^67 

deeply characteristic of America. The United States, they 
point out, are professedly the most democratic country 
in the world j Whitman is professedly the most democratic 
of American writers ; consequently he must be the most 
typical. 

The abstract ideal of democracy has never been better 
summed up than in the well-known watchwords of republican 
PVance : Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Disguised and distorted 
though these words may have been by a century of French 
Revolutionary excess, there is no denying that they stand for 
ideals essentially noble and inspiring. What is more, these 
ideals, which everywhere underlie the revolutionary spirit, have 
consciously influenced the nineteenth century on both sides of 
the Atlantic. In the progress of American democracy, how- 
ever, one of these ideals has been more strenuously kept in 
mind than the other two. American democracy did not spring 
from abstract philosophising ; it had its origin in the old concep 
tions of liberty and rights as maintained by the Common Law of 
England. Though no commonplace, then, has been more 
familiar to American ears than the glittering generality which 
maintains all men to be born equal, the practical enthusiasm 
of American democracy has been chiefly excited by the ideal 
of liberty. The theoretical democracy of Europe, on the other 
hand, has tended rather to emphasise the ideal of fraternity, 
which seems incidentally to include a sound thrashing for any 
brother who fails to feel fraternal ; and still more this Euro- 
pean democracy has tended increasingly to emphasise the dogma 
of human equality. Though this doubtless beautiful ideal 
eloquently appeals to many generous natures, it seems hardly 
to accord with the teachings either of natural law or of any re- 
corded experience. Nothing, it maintains, ought really to be 
held intrinsically better than anything else. In plain words, 
the ideal of equality, carried to its extreme, asserts all superi- 
ority, all excellence, to be a phase of evil. 

Now, Walt Whitman's gospel of democracy certainly In- 



463 THE REST OF THE STORY 

eluded liberty and laid strong emphasis on fraternity. He 
liked to hail his fellow-citizens by the wild, queer name of 
" camerados," which, for some obscure reason of his own, he 
preferred to " comrades." The ideal which most appealed to 
him, however, was that of equality. Though he would hardly 
have assented to such orthodox terms, his creed seems to have 
been that, as God made everything, one thing is just as good 
as another. There are aspects in which such a proposition 
seems analogous to one which should maintain a bronze cent 
to be every whit as good as a gold eagle because both are 
issued by the same government from the same mint. At best, 
however, analogies are. misleading arguments ; and people who 
share Whitman's ideal are apt to disregard as superstitious 
any argument, however impressive, which should threaten to 
modify their faith in equality. It is a superstition, they would 
maintain, that some ways of doing things are decent and some 
not; one way is really just as good as another. It is a super- 
stition that kings, nobles, and gentlemen are in any aspect 
lovelier than the mob. It is a superstition that men of learn- 
ing are intellectually better than the untutored. It is a super- 
stition which would hold a man who can make a chair unable 
consequently to make a constitution. It is a superstition that 
virtuous women are inherently better than street-walkers. It 
is a superstition that law is better than anarchy. There are 
things, to be sure, which are not superstitions. Evil and base- 
ness and ugliness are real facts, to be supremely denounced 
and hated ; and incidentally, we must admit, few arraignments 
of the vulgarity and materialism which have developed in the 
United States are more pitiless than those which appear in 
Whitman's " Democratic Vistas." The cause of these hurt- 
ful things, however, he is satisfied to find in the traces of our 
ancestral and superstitious devotion to outworn ideals of excel- 
lence. We can all find salvation in the new, life-saving ideal 
of equality. Let America accept this ideal, and these faults 
will vanish into that limbo of the past to which he would 



WALT WHITMAN 469 

gladly consign all superstitions. Among these, he logically, 
though reluctantly, includes a great part of the poetry of 
Shakspere ; for Shakspere, undoubtedly a poet, was a poet of 
inequality who represented the people as a mob. For all his 
genius, then, Shakspere was an apostle of the devil, another 
lying prophet of the superstition of excellence. 

Even though excellence be a wicked and tyrannical ideal, 
however, democratic prophecy does not forbid the whole 
world equally to improve. Equalisation need not mean the re- 
ducing of all that is admirable to the level of what is base. It 
may just as well mean the raising of much that is base towards 
the height of what is admirable. The superstition which has 
worked most sordid evil is that which denies human equality. 
Retract the denial, then ; let human beings be equal, and the 
force which has most distorted mankind shall cease working. 
Then all alike may finally rise, side by side, into an equality 
superior to what has gone before. The prophets of equality 
are so stirred by dreams of the future that they half forget 
the horrors of present or past ; and among prophets of equality 
Walt Whitman has the paradoxical merit of eminence. 

Now, this dogma of equality clearly involves a trait which 
has not yet been generally characteristic of American thought 
or letters, — a complete confusion of values. In the early 
days of Renaissance in New England, to be sure, Emerson 
and the rest, dazzled by the splendours of that new world of 
art and literature which was at last thrown open, made small 
distinction between those aspects of it which are excellent and 
those which are only stimulating. At the same time they ad- 
hered as firmly as the Puritans themselves to the ideal of 
excellence ; and among the things with which they were really 
familiar they pretty shrewdly distinguished those which were 
most valuable, either on earth or in heaven. With Walt 
Whitman, on the other hand, everything is confused. 

Take, for example, a passage from his " Song of Myself," 
which contains some of his best-known phrases : — 



470 THE REST OF THE STORY 

" A child said What is the grass f fetcliing it to me with full hands ; 
How could I answer the child ? I do not know what it is any more 
than he. 

"I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green 
stuff woven. 

" Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, 
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, 
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see 
and remark, and say Whose ? 

" Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of vegetation. 

" Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, 
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones. 
Growing among black folds as among white, 

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I 
receive them the same. 

" And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. 

" Tenderly will I use you, curling grass, 
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, 
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, 
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out 

of their mothers' laps, 
And here you are the mothers' laps. 

" The grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers. 
Darker than the colourless beards of old men. 
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. 

"01 perceive after all so many uttering tongues, 
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for 
nothing. 

" I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and 
women. 
And the hints about the old men and mothers, and the offspring 
taken soon out of their laps. 

'' What do you think has become of the young and old men ? 
And what do you think has become of the women and children ? 

" The)'^ are alive and well somewhere, 
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death. 
And if ever there was it had forward life, and does not wait at the 

end to arrest it, 
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. 



WALT WHITMAN 471 

" All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, 
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier." 

Here is perhaps his best-known phrase, " the beautiful uncut 
hair of graves." Here are other good phrases, like " the faint 
red roofs of mouths." Here, too, is undoubtedly tender feel- 
ing. Here, into the bargain, is such rubbish as " I guess it is 
the handkerchief of the Lord," — who incidentally uses per- 
fumery, — and such jargon as " Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congress- 
man, Cuff." In an inextricable hodge-podge you find at once 
beautiful phrases and silly gabble, tender imagination and inso- 
lent commonplace, — pretty much everything, in short, but 
humour. In America this literary anarchy, this complete con- 
fusion of values, is especially eccentric ; for America has gen- 
erally displayed instinctive common-sense, and common-sense 
implies some notion of what things are worth. One begins 
to see why Whitman has been so much more eagerly wel- 
comed abroad than at home. His conception of equality, 
utterly ignoring values, is not that of American democracy, 
but rather that of European. His democracy, in short, is the 
least native which has ever found voice in his country. The 
saving grace of American democracy has been a tacit recog- 
nition that excellence is admirable. 

In temper, then, Walt Whitman seems less American than 
any other of our conspicuous writers. It does not follow that 
in some aspects he is not very American indeed. Almost as 
certainly as Hawthorne, though very differently, he had the true 
artistic temperament ; life moved him to moods which could 
find relief only in expression. Such a temperament would have 
expressed itself anywhere ; and Whitman's would probably 
have found the most congenial material for expression in those 
European regions which have been most disturbed by French 
Revolutionary excess. He chanced, however, to be born, and 
to attain the maturity which he awaited before he began to 
publish, in unmingled American surroundings. As obviously 
as Hawthorne's experience was confined to New England, 



472 THE REST OF THE STORY 

Whitman's was confined to that of the lower classes in those 
regions which were developing into modern New York. 

Whoever remembers the growth of this region will remem- 
ber what sometimes seemed the ugliest thing to the eye, the 
most overwhelmingly oppressive to any instinct of taste, the 
most sordidly hopeless atmosphere possible to human experi- 
ence. Now, Whitman, we remember, came to his maturity 
within scent of the East River; and certainly the East River, 
separating New York and Brooklyn, was at that time the spot 
of spots where life seemed most material, most grindingly 
distant from ideal beauty. Yet the contemplation of this 
very East River evoked from Whitman the poem which 
sometimes seems his most nearly beautiful. Here is the last 
stanza of this " Crossing Brooklyn Ferry " : — 

" Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide! 
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg'd waves ! 
Gorgeous clouds of the sunset ! drench with your splendour me, or 

the men and women generations after me ! 
Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers ! 
Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta ! stand up, beautiful hills of 

Brooklyn ! 
Throb, baffled and curious brain ! throw out questions and answers ! 
Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution ! 
Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public 

assembly ! 
Sound out, voices of young men ! loudly and musically call me by 

my nighest name ! 
Live, old life ! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress ! 
Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one 

makes it ! 
Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways 

be looking upon you ; 
Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste 

with the hasting current ; 
Fly on, sea-birds ! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the 

air; 
Receive the summer sky, you water, and faithfully hold it till all the 

downcast eyes have time to take it from you ! 
Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or anyone's 

head, in the sunlit water ! 



WALT WHITMAN 473 

Come on, ships from the lower bay ! pass up or down, white-sail'd 

schooners, sloops, lighters ! 
Flaunt away, flags of all nations ! be duly lowered at sunset ! 
Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys ! cast black shadows at 

nightfall ! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses ! 
Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are ; 
You necessary film, continue to envelope the soul, 
About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest 

aromas, 
Thrive cities, — bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and 

sufficient rivers. 
Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual. 
Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting. 

"You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers, 
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate hence- 
forward, 
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves 

from us. 
We use you and do not cast you aside — we plant you permanently 

within us. 
We fathom you not — we love you — there is perfection in you also. 
You furnish your parts toward eternity, 
Great or small you furnish your parts toward the soul." 

The eight preceding stanzas are very Hke this, — confused, 
inarticulate, and surging in a mad kind of rhythm which 
sounds as if hexameters were trying to bubble through sewage. 
For all these faults. Whitman has here accomplished a wonder. 
Despite his eccentric insolence both of phrase and of temper 
you feel that in a region where another eye would have seen 
only unspeakable vileness, he has found impulses which prove 
it, like every other region on earth, a fragment of the divine 
eternities. The glories and beauties of the universe are really 
perceptible everywhere ; and into what seemed utterly sordid 
Whitman has breathed ennobling imaginative fervour. Cul- 
tured and academic folk are disposed to shrink from what they 
call base, to ignore it, to sneer at it ; looking closer. Whitman 
tells us that even amid base things you cannot wander so far 
as to lose sight of the heavens, with all their fountains of 
glorious emotion. 



474 THE REST OF THE STORY 

But what is this emotion ? Just here Whitman seems to 
stop. With singular vividness, and with the unstinted sym- 
pathy of his fervent faith in equality, he tells what he sees. 
Though often his jargon is amorphously meaningless, his 
words are now and again so apt as to approach that inevitable 
union of thought and phrase which makes lasting poetry. 
When he has reported what he sees, however, utterly confus- 
ing its values, he has nothing more to say about it. At most 
he leaves you with a sense of new realities concerning which 
you must do your thinking for yourself. 

Sometimes, of course, he was more articulate. The Civil 
War stirred him to his depths ; and he drew of its byways 
such little pictures as " Ethiopia Saluting the Colours " : — 

"Who are you dusky woman, so ancient, hardly human, 
With your wooly-white and turban'd head, and bare bony feet ? 
Why rising by the roadside here, do you the colours greet? 

" ('T is while our army lines Carolina's sands and pines, 
Forth from thy hovel door thou Ethiopia com'st to me, 
As under doughty Sherman I march toward the sea.) 

^' Me master years a hundred since frofn my parents sunder'' d, 
A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught, 
Then hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brojtght. 

" No further does she say, but lingering all the day, 
Her high-borne turban'd head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye 
And courtesies to the regiments, the guidons moving by. 

"What is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human? 
Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red and green ? 
Are the things so strange and marvellous you see or have seen ? " 

In Lincoln he found his ideal hero; and his verse on Lin- 
coln's death is probably his best : — 

" O Captain ! my Captain ! our fearful trip is done, 
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won, 
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, 
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; 



WALT WHITMAN 475 

But O heart ! heart ! heart ! 
O the bleeding drops of red, 
Where on the deck my Captain lies, 
Fallen cold and dead. 

" O Captain ! my Captain ! rise up and hear the bells ; 
Rise up — for you the flag is flung — for you the bugle trills, 
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths — for you the shores a- 

crowding, 
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning ; 
Here Captain ! dear father ! 
This arm beneath your head ! 

It is some dream that on the deck, 
You 've fallen cold and dead. 

" My Captain does not answer, hi^ lips are pale and still, 
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, 
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, 
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won ; 
Exult O shores, and ring O bells ! 
But I with mournful tread, 

Walk the deck my Captain lies, 
Fallen cold and dead." 

Even in bits like this, however, which come so much 
nearer form than is usual with Whitman, one feels his per- 
verse rudeness of style. Such eccentricity of manner is bound 
to affect different tempers in different ways. One kind of 
reader, naturally eager for individuality and fresh glimpses of 
truth, is disposed to identify oddity and originality. Another 
kind of reader distrusts literary eccentricity as instinctively as 
polite people distrust bad manners. In both of these instinc- 
tive reactions from such a method of address as Whitman's 
there is an element of truth. Beyond doubt, eccentric mas- 
ters of the fine arts give rise to perverse eccentricity in imita- 
tors. Browning and Carlyle, to go no further, have bred in 
brains feebler than their own much nonsensical spawn ; and 
so has Walt Whitman. But some artists of great power 
prove naturally unable to express themselves properly. Their 
trouble is like a muscular distortion which should compel 
lameness, or a vocal malformation which should make utter- 



476 THE REST OF THE STORY 

ance hoarse or shrill. So there have been great men, and 
there will be more, whom fate compels either to express them- 
selves uncouthly or else to stay dumb. Such a man, great or 
not, Whitman seems to have been. Such men, greater than 
he, were Carlyle and Browning. The critical temper which 
would hold them perverse, instead of unfortunate, is mistaken. 

On the other hand, that different critical temper which 
would welcome their perversities as newly revealed evidences 
of genius is quite as mistaken in another way. If any general 
law may be inferred from the history of fine arts, it is that 
any persistent school of expression must be articulate. In any 
art, of course, vital expression must be spontaneous; academic 
training, dogmatic routine, has never originated much that is 
worth while. The nobler works of art, however, which have 
maintained themselves as permanent parts of the great structure 
of human expression, have form. Their lasting vitality comes 
partly from the fact that their makers have spontaneously obeyed 
natural laws which may be generalised into academic princi- 
ples. The development of human expression seems like the 
growth of a tree. The same vital force which sends the 
trunk heavenward, puts forth branches, and from these in turn 
sends forth twigs and leaves; but the further they stray from 
the root, the weaker they prove. The trunk lives, and the 
greater branches ; year by year, the lesser twigs and leaves 
wither. Now, eccentricity of manner, however unavoidable, is 
apt to indicate that art has strayed dangerously far from its 
vital origin. Oddity is no part of solid artistic development ; 
however beautiful or impressive, it is rather an excrescent out- 
growth, bound to prove abortive, and at the same time to sap 
life from a parent stock which without it might grow more 
loftily and strongly. ^ 

Walt Whitman's style is of this excrescent, abortive kind. 
Like Carlyle's or Browning's, it is something which nobody 
else can imitate with impunity ; and so, like theirs, it is a style 
which in the history of literature suggests a familiar phase of 



WALT WHITMAN 



477 



decline. That It was inevitable you will feel if you compare 
" Ethiopia Saluting the Colours " or " My Captain "with the 
unchecked perversities of Whitman's verse in general. The 
"Song of Myself," or "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," which we 
may take as generally representative of his work, are so reck- 
lessly misshapen that you cannot tell whether their author was 
able to write with amenity. When you find him, however, as 
in those lesser pieces, attempting technical form, you at once 
feel that his eccentricity is a misfortune, for which he is no 
more to blame than a lame man for limping, or a deaf and 
dumb for expressing emotion by inarticulate cries. The alter- 
native would have been silence ; and Whitman was enough 
of a man to make one glad that he never dreamed of it. 

In this decadent eccentricity of Whitman's style there is 
again something foreign to the spirit of this country. Amer- 
ican men of letters have generally had deep artistic conscience. 
This trait has resulted, for one thing, in making the short 
story, an essentially organic form of composition, as character- 
istic of American literature as the straggling, inorganic three- 
volume novel is of English. Now and again, to be sure, 
American men of letters have chosen to express themselves 
in quite another manner. They have tried to reproduce the 
native dialects of the American people. This impulse has 
resulted in at least one masterpiece, that amazing Odyssey of 
the Mississippi to which Mark Twain gave the fantastic name 
of " Huckleberry Finn." As we remarked of the "Biglow 
Papers," however, this " dialect " literature of America often 
proves on analysis more elaborately studied than orthodox 
work by the same writers. Neither the " Biglow Papers " 
nor " Huckleberry Finn " could have been produced without 
an artistic conscience as strenuous as Irving's, or Poe's, or 
Hawthorne's. The vagaries of Walt Whitman, on the other 
hand, are as far from literary conscience as the animals which 
he somewhere celebrates are from unhappiness or respecta- 
bility. Whitman's style, then, is as little characteristic of 



4/8 THE REST OF THE STORY 

America as his temper is of traditional American democracy. 
One can see why the decadent taste of modern Europe 
has welcomed him so much more ardently than he has ever 
been welcomed at home ; in temper and in style he was an 
exotic member of that sterile brotherhood which eagerly greeted 
him abroad. In America his oddities were more eccentric 
than they would have been anywhere else. 

On the other hand, there is an aspect in which he seems 
not only native but even promising. During the years when 
his observation was keenest, and his temper most alert, he 
lived in the environment from which our future America 
seems most likely to spring. He was born and grew up, he 
worked and lived, where on either side of the East River the 
old American towns of New York and Brooklyn were develop- 
ing into the metropolis which is still too young to possess ripe 
traditions. In full maturity he devoted himself to army 
nursing, — the least picturesque or glorious, and the most 
humanely heroic, service which he could have rendered his 
country during its agony of civil war. In that Civil War the 
elder America perished ; the new America which then arose is 
not yet mature enough for artistic record. Whitman's earthly 
experience, then, came throughout in chaotic times, when our 
past had faded and our future had not yet sprung into being. 
Bewildering confusion, fused by the accident of his lifetime 
into the seeming unity of a momentary whole, was the only 
aspect of human existence which could be afforded him by the 
native country which he so truly loved. For want of other 
surroundings he was content to seek the meaning of life amid 
New York slums and dingy suburban country, in the crossing 
of Brooklyn Ferry, or in the hospitals which strove to alle- 
viate the drums and tramplings of civil war. His lifelong 
eagerness to find in life the stuff of which poetry is made has 
brought him, after all, the reward he would most have cared for. 
In one aspect he is thoroughly American. The spirit of his 
work is that of world-old anarchy; its form has all the perverse 



WALT WHITMAN 479 

oddity of world-old abortive decadence ; but the substance of 
which his poems are made — their imagery as distinguished 
from their form or their spirit — comes wholly from our 
native country. 

In this aspect, then, though probably in no other, he may, 
after all, throw light on the future of literature in America. 
As has been said before, " He is uncouth, inarticulate, what- 
ever you please that is least orthodox ; yet, after all, he can 
make you feel for the moment how even the ferry-boats ply- 
ing from New York to Brooklyn are fragments of God's 
eternities. Those of us who love the past are far from 
sharing his confidence in the future. Surely, however, that is 
no reason for denying the miracle that he has wrought by 
idealising the East River. The man who has done this is the 
only one who points out the stuff of which perhaps the new 
American literature of the future may in time be made." 



Ill 



LITERATURE IN THE SOUTH 

The Middle States and New England, after certain literary 
achievements, seem now in a stage either of decline or at best 
of preparation for some literature of the future. The other 
parts of the country, at which we have now to glance, will not 
detain us long. However copious their production, it has not 
yet afforded us much of permanent value. 

Professor Trent, formerly of the University of the South, 
and now of Columbia, promises a book concerning Southern 
literature which will be welcome to every American student. 
Meanwhile, the best authority on the subject is his admirable 
monograph on William Gilmore Simms, in the American 
Men of Letters Series. The impression produced by reading 
this work is confirmed by an interesting manuscript lately 
prepared by another Southern gentleman. In the winter of 
1898, Mr. George Stockton Wills, a graduate both of the 
University of North Carolina and of Harvard, made an elab- 
orate study of the literature produced in the South before the 
Civil War. A thoroughly trained student, he brought to 
light and clearly defined a number of literary figures whose 
very names have generally been forgotten. The more you 
consider these figures, however, the more inevitable seems 
the neglect into which they have fallen. They were simple, 
sincere, enthusiastic writers, mostly of verse ; but their work, 
even compared only with the less important Northern work 
of their time, seems surprisingly imitative. Up to the Civil 
War, the South had produced hardly any writing which 
expressed more than a pleasant sense that standard models 
are excellent. 



THE SOUTH 481 

A ripe example of this may be found in Stedman and 
Hutchinson's " Library of American Literature." The most 
gifted and accomplished of Southern poets was Sidney Lanier; 
and among his more impressive poems Stedman and Hutchin- 
son select one entitled " The Revenge of Hamish." Lanier, a 
native of Georgia, never strayed much farther from his birth- 
place than Baltimore ; yet this '■' Revenge of Hamish " is a 
passionate account of how the cruelly abused retainer of a 
Highland chieftain murders his master's son after fiercely 
humiliating the father. In other words, the substance of this 
characteristic production of our most powerful Southern poet 
comes straight from the romantic mountains brought into liter- 
ature by Walter Scott. Not a line of the poem suggests that 
it proceeds from our own Southern States. Unlike the " Re- 
venge of Hamish," itself admirable, the imitative poetry of 
the South is generally commonplace and conventional. 

For this comparative literary lifelessness there is obvious 
historical reason. The difference between the Southern clim- 
ate and the Northern has often been dwelt on ; so has the 
difference between the social systems of the two parts of the 
country. It has often been remarked, too, that the oligarchic 
system of the South developed powerful poUticians. At the 
time of the Revolution, for example, our most eminent states- 
men were from Virginia ; and when the Civil War came, 
though the economic superiority of the North was bound 
to win, the political ability of the South seemed generally 
superior. One plain cause of these facts has not been much 
emphasised. 

From the beginning, the North was politically free and 
essentially democratic ; its social distinctions were nothing 
like so rigid as those which have generally diversified civilised 
society. There was no mob ; the lower class of New Eng- 
land produced Whittier, In a decent Yankee village, to this 
day, you need not lock your doors at night; and when crime 
turns up in the North, as it does with increasing frequency, 

31 



482 THE REST OF THE STORY 

you can still trust the police to attend to it. In the South, at 
least from the moment when slavery established itself, a to- 
tally different state of affairs prevailed. The African slaves, 
constantly increasing in number, seemed the most dangerous 
lower class which had ever faced an English-speaking gov- 
ernment. The agricultural conditions of Southern life mean- 
while prevented population from gathering in considerable 
centres. As slavery developed, the South accordingly grew 
to be a region where a comparatively small governing class, 
the greater part of whom lived separately on large country 
places, felt themselves compelled, by the risk of servile insur- 
rection, to devote their political energies to the rigid main- 
tenance of established order. Whether slavery was really so 
dangerous as people thought may be debatable ; there can be 
no question that people living in such circumstances could 
hardly help believing it so. However human, native Africans 
are still savage ; and although, long before the Civil War, the 
Southern slaves had shown such sensitiveness to comparatively 
civilised conditions as to have lost their superficial savagery, 
and indeed as still to warrant, in many hopeful minds, even the 
franchise which was ultimately granted them, the spectre of 
darkest Africa loomed behind them all. Surrounded by an 
increasing servile population of unalterable aliens, then, in 
whose increase their fatal social system gave them irresistible 
interest, the ruling classes of our elder South dreaded political 
experiment to a degree almost incomprehensible in the North, 
where the social conditions permitted men of power to neglect 
politics for private business. If any phase of the established 
Southern order were altered, no Southern mind dared guess 
what might happen ; it might be such infernal horrors as had 
devastated San Domingo. More and more, then, the ablest 
men of the South naturally tended to concentrate their ener- 
gies on politics, and in politics to develop increasingly conser- 
vative temper. 

The natural result was such as conservatism would pro- 



THE SOUTH 483 

duce anywhere. Up to the time of the Civil War a normal 
Southerner was far less changed from his emigrant ancestor 
than was any New England Yankee, Compared with what 
happened in Europe between 16 20 and i860 there was little 
alteration even in our Northern States ; in the South the past 
lingered even more tenaciously. A Southern trait — familiar 
because it lends itself so pleasantly to burlesque — is a com- 
placent opinion that Southerners descend from Cavaliers, and 
Yankees from the socially inferior Roundheads. Though this 
fact is more than debatable, the Southern belief in it indicates 
a truth; at least up to the Civil War the personal temper of the 
better classes in the South remained more like that of the better 
classes in seventeenth-century England than anything else in 
the modern world. Concrete examples of this may be found 
in two or three facts on which we have already touched. 
When Preston Brooks struck Charles Sumner in the United 
States Senate, for example, Brooks exhibited traits which 
neither England nor the Northern States had quite under- 
stood since Cromwell's Commonwealth. Again, the ablest 
legal presentation of the constitutional claims of the Southern 
Confederacy was the " War between the States," published 
before 1870 by Mr. Alexander Hamilton Stephens, of Georgia. 
Mr. Stephens was an accomplished lawyer, a statesman, and a 
gentleman. Until the moment of secession he endeavoured 
to preserve the Union on grounds of expediency ; but he 
believed in State Rights, and he reluctantly but honestly gave 
himself to the Confederacy, of which he became Vice-Presi- 
dent. After the war, he wrote this book, defending his course 
on constitutional grounds. His serious political argument was 
cast in the form of a dialogue, with three interlocutors, which 
proceeds through two large volumes. Now, in classical times 
dialogue was a familiar form of serious exposition. Plato 
wrote dialogues, and Cicero wrote them, and later Plutarch ; 
and when the Renaissance revived classical tradition in Italv, 
people again took to arguing in dialogue form, because clas- 



484 THE REST OF THE STORY 

sical masters had so argued. In England this mannerism was 
in full feather when Drj^den wrote about Dramatic Poesy and 
Addison of Ancient Medals ; by the middle of the eighteenth 
century it had almost died out there. More than a century 
later it still seemed normal to the most accomplished states- 
man of Georgia. As a rhetorician, Mr. Stephens lingered in a 
stage nearly outgrown in England before Queen Anne yielded 
the throne to the House of Brunswick. A trivial symptom, 
perhaps ; but a true one. In the development of national 
character, even the North of America has lagged behind 
England ; and the South has lagged behind the North. 
Long ago we saw how our first great civil war — the Amer- 
ican Revolution — sprang almost inevitably from mutual mis- 
understandings, involved in the different rates of development 
of England and of her American colonies. Something of the 
same kind, we can see now, underlay the Civil War which 
once threatened the future of the American Union. 

Of course the South was never destitute of powerful or of 
cultivated minds ; and from the beginning there were South- 
ern books. A rather fantastic habit includes among these the 
voyages of Captain John Smith and the Elizabethan transla- 
tion of Ovid by George Sandys, a portion of which was made 
on the banks of the James River ; and there are various old 
historical writings from the South. The best of them seem 
the posthumously published manuscripts of William Byrd of 
Westover, a Virginian gentleman who lived from 1664 to 
1 744, who had considerable social experience in England, and 
whose style is very like that of his contemporary Englishmen 
of quality. In the fact that Byrd's records of contemporary 
history were written for his private pleasure by a great landed 
proprietor, and that they saw the light only when he had been 
nearly a century in his grave, there is something characteris- 
tic of the South. Southern gentlemen of an intellectual turn 
collected considerable libraries ; but these libraries, chiefly of 
serious standard literature, tended more and more to become 



THE SOUTH 485 

traditional repositories of culture. Southern taste commanded 
each generation to preserve its culture unaltered, much as 
political necessity compelled the South to keep unaltered its 
government and its society. 

At the time of the Revolution, of course, the development 
of political intelligence in the South produced powerful po- 
litical writing. In Professor Tyler's admirable " Literary 
History of the American Revolution " the Declaration of 
Independence, which came straight from the pen of the 
Virginian Jefferson, is treated as a Uterary masterpiece. So 
in certain aspects it is, — the masterpiece of a school in which 
Jefferson, though perhaps the principal figure, was no more 
soUtary than Emerson was in New England Transcenden- 
talism. As in the North, too, this political writing tended 
during the first half of the nineteenth century to develop 
into rhetorical oratory ; and though among American orators 
Webster and Choate and Everett and their New England 
contemporaries seem the best, no special study of American 
oratory can neglect such men as Calhoun, Hayne, or Henry 
Clay. Oratory, however, is not pure letters, but rather a 
phase of public life; and our concern is chiefly with litera- 
ture. A sufficient indication of the literary work of the South 
may be found in the chronological tables which form the 
appendix of Mr. Pancoast's excellent little " Introduction 
to American Literature." 

The names which he gives after that of Jefferson are the 
following: George Washington, to whose "Farewell Ad- 
dress" he accords full literary recognition; William Wirt, 
a Virginia lawyer, for some years Attorney-General of the 
United States, to whose elaborately rhetorical " Life of Pat- 
rick Henry " he gives a place among standard American 
biographers ; John Marshall, the most eminent Chief Justice 
of the Supreme Court of the United States, also a Virginian, 
whose place in literature according to Mr. Pancoast is earned 
by his celebrated " Life of Washington ; " Edward Coate 



486 THE REST OF THE STORY 

Pinckney, a Maryland lawyer and professor, who died young 
in 1828, and who had published certain volumes of poetry 
which reveal a true lyric gift ; Henry Clay, whose position 
in literature is due to his oratory ; William Gilmore Simms ; 
Edgar Allan Poe ; Audubon, who, like Poe, seems Southern 
only by courtesy ; John Pendleton Kennedy ; Augustus B. 
Longstreet ; Charles E. Gayarre ; Francis Lieber, a German 
by birth, and for his last twenty years an eminent resident 
of New York ; John Esten Cooke ; Paul Hamilton Hayne ; 
Henry Timrod; and Sidney Lanier. Mr. Pancoast mentions 
too the names of a few writers still happily living ; and he 
remarks as notable Southern periodicals the " Southern Re- 
view," which was published at Charleston in 1828 and had 
a short life ; the " Southern Literary Messenger," which was 
published in Richmond from 1835 to 1864; and the "South- 
ern Quarterly Review," which was established at Charleston 
in 1848, remained for several years under the editorship of 
William Gilmore Simms, and came to an end in 1856. 

Of these names the earlier clearly belong to the traditions 
of the eighteenth century. Several of the later are already 
almost forgotten. Kennedy, a Maryland man eminent in 
political life, was the author of a novel called " Horse-Shoe 
Robinson." Longstreet, a Georgia man born in 1790, a 
graduate of Yale, a lawyer, a judge, a Methodist minister, 
and the president of two or three colleges, contributed to 
various newspapers sketches of Southern life, which in 1840 
were collected into a volume called " Georgia Scenes." 
These, which had a considerable success, and have lately been 
reprinted, are pleasant prototypes of the local short stories 
which during the past fifteen or twenty years have so gener- 
ally appeared in various parts of the country. Gayarre, a 
New Orleans lawyer born in 1805, survived until lately. 
His works on the history of his native State, published be- 
tween 1847 ^"^ 1854^ ^"^ culminating in a three-volume 
"History of Louisiana," published in 1866, are respectable 



THE SOUTH 487 

and authoritative local histories. Late in life he produced one 
or two novels and comedies which have been kindly spoken 
of, but which were never widely read. Cooke of Virginia, 
a lawyer and a Confederate soldier, who was born in 1830 
and died in 1886, devoted the chief activity of his mature 
years to literature, and early produced " The Virginia Come- 
dians," which is still pleasantly mentioned. He wrote cer- 
tain other romances connected with his native State before 
and after the Civil War. And so on. It is hardly too much 
to say that if these sporadic writers had not been Southerners, 
they would have been even more forgotten than they are, 
along with the Literati momentarily enshrined in 1846 by 
Edgar Allan Poe. 

Poe himself, as we decided long ago, is Southern only by 
courtesy ; he relates himself more closely to literary New 
York at the moment when its old traditions were passing 
into the Knickerbocker School. In Mr. Pancoast's list, then, 
there are only four Southern names which now seem of any 
literary importance j and of these only one stands for con- 
siderable work before the Civil War. 

This is that of William Gilmore Simms, whose Life, by 
Professor Trent, remains, as we have seen, the most interest- 
ing and suggestive book concerning our Southern literature. 
Simms was born in 1806 at Charleston, South Carolina. Of 
this most typical Southern city Professor Trent gives an ad- 
mirable sketch. If any one spot can be held completely 
characteristic of a region so extended as the elder South, 
that spot was Charleston, — a fact historically evident when 
v^e remember that from Charleston came the Nullification 
movement of 1832, and that thirty years later the bombard- 
ment of Fort Sumter by Charleston militia began our armed 
conflict. In Simms's youth the social hierarchy of Charleston 
was so rio-id as to make Northern social distinctions seem the 
acme of human equality ; and meantime the general con- 
servatism of Southern temper was in Charleston at its most 



488 THE REST OF THE STORY 

conservative. Simms was born there in a socially lower class. 
He had little education ; as a boy he was apprenticed to an 
apothecary; later he began the study of law. In 1825 he 
made an excursion to the southwest to visit his father, who 
had removed thither, and who strongly urged him not to return 
to Charleston, where his social obscurity would almost certainly 
interfere with his ambition. Simms, however, who was in love 
with a Charleston girl, insisted on going home; at the age of 
twenty-one he married a lady of social position in no way 
superior to his own ; and a year later he published a volume 
of commonplace poetry. From that time he was an ex- 
tremely prolific writer. In a partial bibliography of his work 
Professor Trent mentions no less than eighty-seven volumes 
from his pen between 1827 and his death in 1870. His first 
wife died early; by 1836 he had so improved his condition that 
a second marriage happily allied him to the family of a consider- 
able planter. From that time until the Civil War, though his per- 
sonal sympathies never quite agreed with those of the traditional 
aristocracy, his social position was more and more secure. 

The immense bulk of Simms's writings — for forty years 
he produced books at the rate of more than two volumes a 
year, and he did incalculable journalistic work, too — in- 
volved hasty and careless composition ; and the romances, to 
which his popularity was chiefly due, are not only careless but 
obviously affected by both Cooper and Scott, not to speak of 
such minor influences as those of William Godwin and per- 
haps of Brockden Brown. In their day some of them were 
widely popular ; at the present time even their names are al- 
most forgotten. For all their careless haste, however, they in- 
dicate uncommon vigour of temperament, and amid the obvious 
conventions of their plots and characters they constantly reveal, 
like the earlier romances of Brockden Brown and of Cooper, a 
true sense of the background in which the scenes were laid. 

Up to the time of the Civil War, beyond much question, 
Simms was bv far the most considerable literary man whom 



THE SOUTH 489 

the Southern States produced. In South Carolina he was long 
recognised as the principal figure of a literary epoch contem- 
porary with that which in New England produced Emerson 
and Thoreau, and Whittier, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and 
Holmes, and Hawthorne. This collocation of names is 
enough. Our chief Southern man of letters before the Civil 
War was at best one who did vigorous, careless work of the 
sort which had produced more lasting monuments in the New 
York of Fenimore Cooper. Cooper's work, we have seen, 
was virtually complete in 1832 ; and Simms's did not begin 
until 1833. •'■" literature as in temper the South lagged 
behind the North. 

Simms lived through the Civil War. An ardent, sincere 
Secessionist, he suffered greatly for the cause to which he was 
conscientiously devoted. When the war broke out, however, 
he was already fifty-five years old. His work as a whole, 
then, is not, like that of the other Southerners on whom we 
shall touch, saturated with the spirit of the tragic years 
which brought to its end the old civilisation of their native 
region. Solemn enough to the uninvaded North, the war 
meant more than Northern imagination has yet realised to 
those Southern States into whose heart its horrors were slowly, 
surely carried. Such a time was too intense for much ex- 
pression ; it was a moment rather for heroic action ; and in 
South and North alike it found armies of heroes. Of these 
there are few more stirring records than a simple ballad made 
by Dr. Ticknor, of Georgia, concerning a Confederate private 
soldier : — 

" Little Giffen. 

" Out of the focal and foremost fire, 
Out of the hospital walls as dire; 
Smitten of grape-shot and gangrene, 
(Eighteenth battle, and he sixteen ! ) 
Spectre ! such as you seldom see, 
Little Giffen, of Tennessee ! 



490 THE REST OF THE STORY 

" ' Take him and welcome ! ' the surgeons said; 
Little the doctor can help the dead ! 
So we took him ; and brought him where 
The balm was sweet in the summer air ; 
And we laid him down on a wholesome bed — 
Utter Lazarus, heel to head ! 

" And we watched the war with abated breath, — 
Skeleton Boy against skeleton Death. 
Months of torture, how many such ? 
Weary weeks of the stick and crutch ; 
And still a glint of the steel-blue eye 
Told of a spirit that would n't die, 

" And did n't. Nay, more, in death's despite 
The crippled skeleton learned to write. 
' Dear Mother,' at first, of course ; and then 
' Dear Captain,' inquiring about the men. 
Captain's answer : ' Of eighty-and-five, 
Giffen and I are left alive.' 

*' Word of gloom from the war, one day ; 

Johnston pressed at the front, they say. 

Little Giffen was up and away; 

A tear — his first — as he bade good-bye. 

Dimmed the glint of his steel-blue eye. 

' I '11 write, if spared ! ' There was news of the fight ; 

But none of Giffen. He did not write. 

" I sometimes fancy that, were I king 
Of the princely Knights of the Golden Ring, 
With the song of the minstrel in mine ear, 
And the tender legend that trembles here, 
I 'd give the best on his bended knee, 
The whitest soul of my chivalry. 
For ' Little Giffen,' of Tennessee." 

Dr. Ticknor, who survived till 1874, was not thought im- 
portant enough for record in Mr. Pancoast's chronological 
tables. His poems were edited, however, by a friend who, 
though he never wrote anything so powerful as " Little Giffen " 
was deservedly recognised by Mr. Pancoast. This was Paul 
Hamilton Hayne, a member of that distinguished South 
Carolina family which produced the Senator whose speech on 



THE SOUTH 491 

Nullification in 1830 elicited Webster's famous reply. Paul 
Hayne was born in this very year when his uncle and Webster 
were debating in the Senate. He studied for the bar, but 
devoted himself chiefly to literature at a time when the lit- 
erary activity of Charleston was dominated by Simms. When 
the Civil War came he entered the Southern army ; he broke 
down his health in the service. The war left him, too, ruined 
in property 5 but he survived, working hard at letters in the 
Georgia country, until 1886. 

Professor Trent's " Life of Simms " gives us many glimpses 
of Hayne, showing how eagerly he strove to maintain the 
literary dignity of the region which he passionately loved. A 
man of gentler origin than Simms, and distinctly better edu- 
cated, his temper seems more in sympathy with the formal 
traditions of the South Carolina gentry. It shows too an 
academic sense of conventional standards. In this aspect 
Hayne had something in common with the New England 
poets. Certainly, compared with such verses as " Little 
Giffen," and with the best work of Timrod and of Sidney 
Lanier, his poetry seems deficient in individuality and passion ; 
yet whoever will turn only to Stedman and Hutchinson must 
feel in Hayne a touch of genuineness almost unknown in 
the South until the fatal days of civil war. 

It is characteristic of Hayne that he was held by his ad- 
mirers, and probably liked to be held, an excellent maker of 
sonnets. The praise is excessive. Excellent sonnets are 
rare in the whole range of literature. The fact that Hayne 
loved to express himself in this studied and deliberate form, 
however, and that he managed it well enough to be remarked, 
means that he was at heart not only a man of deep emotional 
impulse, but an artist. The sonnet which Stedman and Hutch- 
inson have chosen to represent him is not faultless ; nor is 
lack of lyric smoothness its only fault. In substance, like so 
much American poetry, it is commonplace ; in style it is 
rather reminiscent of many admirable models than strongly 



492 THE REST OF THE STORY 

individual; but it has genuine fervour. Few American sonnets 
seem more sincere. "Fate or God? " he calls it ; and here it is : 

" Beyond the record of all eldest things, 
Beyond the rule and regions of past time, 
From out Antiquity's hoary-headed rime, 
Looms the dread phantom of a King of kings •. 
Round his vast brow the glittering circlet clings 
Of a thrice royal crown ; beneath Him climb, 
O'er Atlantean limbs and breast sublime, 
The sombre splendours of mysterious wings ; 
Deep calms of measureless power, in awful state, 
Gird and uphold Him; a miraculous rod, 
To heal or smite, arms His infallible hands; 
Known in all ages, worshipped in all lands. 
Doubt names this half-embodied mystery — Fate, 
While Faith, with lowliest reverence, whispers — God!" 

In 1873 Hayne edited the poems of his friend Henry Tim- 
rod. These have maintained such reputation that a new and 
enlarged edition has lately appeared. In the introduction to 
this collection one can feel throughout the provincial note of 
Southern literary temper. Its style is amiably florid to a 
degree which in the North would have always seemed a little 
ridiculous ; so, in spite of amiably modest temper, its superla- 
tive estimate of Timrod's merit makes his work at first glance 
seem less noteworthy than it really is. He had in him the 
stuff of which poetry is made, and the circumstances of his 
career made some of his expression of it admirable. Timrod 
was born in Charleston in 1829, the son of an artisan who 
was known as the Poet Mechanic. He was further than 
Simms, then, from belonging to the hereditary gentry of South 
Carolina ; but he had inherited love for literature. He studied 
for a while at the University of Georgia ; he then turned to 
the law; and for some time before the Civil War he was 
private tutor in a gentleman's family. During the war he 
was a journalist. At the burning of Columbia during Sher- 
man's march to the sea his property was totally destroyed j 



THE SOUTH - 493 

in 1867 his consequent poverty brought to an end a life which 
was never physically robust. 

Among Timrod's poems, one, " The Cotton Boll," has 
emerged from the rest. It begins thus : — 

*' While I recline 
At ease beneath 
This immemorial pine, 
Small sphere ! 

(By dusky fingers brought this morning here 
And shown with boastful smiles), 
I turn thy cloven sheath, 
Through which the soft white fibres peer, 
That, with their gossamer bands, 
Unite, like love, the sea divided lands, 
And slowly, thread by thread, 
Draw forth the folded strands. 
Than which the trembling line. 
By whose frail help yon startled spider fled 
Down the tall spear-grass from his swinging bed, 
Is scarce more fine ; 
And as the tangled skein 
Unravels in my hands, 
Betwixt me and the noonday light 
A veil seems lifted, and for miles and miles 
The landscape broadens on my sight. 
As in the little boll, there lurked a spell 
Like that which in the ocean shell, 
With mystic sound 

Breaks down the narrow walls that hem us round, 
And turns some city lane 
Into the restless main. 
With all his capes and isles ! " 

The eccentric irregularity of this laboured verse cannot dis- 
guise its lyric note ; and the sense of Nature which it reveals 
is as fine, as true, and as simple as that which makes so nearly 
excellent Whittier's poems about New England landscapes. 
And so " The Cotton Boll" proceeds, turning into poetry 
what might seem a very commonplace motive, — namely, re- 
flections on the various blessings brought to mankind by the 
chief staple of the South. The closing Hnes of the poem. 



494 THE REST OF THE STORY 

which touch on the Civil War, strike another note, and a 
stirring : — 

" As men who labour in that mine 
Of Cornwall, hollowed out beneath the bed 
Of ocean, when a storm rolls overhead, 
Hear the dull booming of the world of brine 
Above them, and a mighty muffled roar 
Of winds and waters, yet toil calmly on, 
And split the rock, and pile the massive ore, 
Or carve a niche, or shape the arched roof ; 
So I, as calmly, weave my woof 
Of song, chanting the days to come, 
Unsilenced, though the quiet summer air 
Stirs with the bruit of battles, and each dawn 
Wakes from its starry silence to the hum 
Of many gathering armies. Still, 
In that we sometimes hear. 
Upon the Northern winds, the voice of woe 
Not wholly drowned in triumph, though I know 
The end must crown us, and a few brief years 
Dry all our tears, 

I may not sing too gladly. To Thy will 
Resigned, O Lord ! we cannot all forget 
That there is much even Victory must regret. 
And, therefore, not too long 
From the great burthen of our country's wrong 
Delay our just release ! 
And, if it may be, save 
These sacred fields of peace 
From stain of patriot or of hostile blood ! 
Oh, help us. Lord ! to roll the crimson flood 
Back on its course, and, while our banners wing 
Northward, strike with us ! till the Goth shall cling 
To his own blasted altar-stones, and crave 
Mercy ; and we shall grant it, and dictate 
The lenient future of his fate 

There, where some rotting ships and crumbling quays 
Shall one day mark the Port which ruled the Western seas." 

Our Civil War brought forth no lines more fervent, and 
few whose fervour rises to such lyric height. In the days of 
conflict, North regarded South, and South North, as the incar- 



THE SOUTH 495 

nation of evil. Time, however, has begun its healing work ; 
at last our country begins to understand itself better than ever 
before; and as our new patriotism strengthens, we cannot 
prize too highly such verses as Whittier's, honestly phrasing 
noble Northern sentiment, or as Timrod's, who with equal 
honesty phrased the noble sentiment of the South. A litera- 
ture which in the same years could produce works so utterly 
antagonistic in superficial sentiment, and yet so harmonious in 
their common sincerity and loftiness of feeling, is a literature 
from which riches may come. 

We can hardly have read even this short extract from 
Timrod, however, without feeling, along with his lyric quality, 
a lack of articulation which prevents his work from excel- 
lence. A similar trait appears in the work of the most 
memorable man of letters as yet produced by the South, — 
Sidney Lanier. Born at Macon, Georgia, in 1842, Lanier 
graduated from a Georgia college in i860, and at the out- 
break of the Civil War he enlisted as a Confederate volun- 
teer. Towards the close of the war he was taken prisoner ; 
the physical hardships of his military experience produced a 
weakness of the lungs from which he never recovered. After 
the war he was for a while a school-teacher, and for a while 
a lawyer in Alabama and Georgia. In 1873 he removed to 
Baltimore, where at first he supported himself by playing the 
flute in a symphony orchestra. Soon, however, he became 
known as a man of letters; and in 1879 he was made a 
lecturer on English literature at Johns Hopkins University. 
He survived this appointment two years, dying in 1881. 

A true lyric artist, Lanier was a skilful musician, and he 
wrote genuine poetry. The circumstances of his life, how- 
ever, were such as to preclude a very high degree of technical 
training, and, at least until after the war had broken his 
health, much systematic study. What he accomplished under 
these circumstances is astonishing. He was never popular, 
and probably never will be. His quality was too fine to ap- 



496 THE REST OF THE STORY 

peal to the general public ; his training was too imperfect to 
make his critical work or his theories of aesthetics seem im- 
portant to technical scholars. He was compelled besides to 
write more than was good for him, — at least one novel, for 
example, and versions for boys of much old romance, concern- 
ing King Arthur, and the heroes of Froissart, and the Welsh 
tales of the " Mabinogion," and Percy's " Reliques." He 
wrote nothing more characteristic, however, than that " Sci- 
ence of English Verse " which comprises the substance of his 
first course of lectures at Johns Hopkins. To state his serious 
and earnest system of dogmatic poetics, would take too long. 
In brief, he believed the function of poetry to be far nearer 
to that of music than it has generally been held. The emo- 
tional effect of poetry he declared to arise literally from its 
sound quite as much as from its meaning; and the poetry which 
he wrote was decidedly affected by this deliberate, sincere, but 
somewhat cramping theory. Even in his earlier verse you 
feel this impediment. Here, for example, is a song which 
he is said to have made in 1866. 

" Night and Day. 

" The innocent, sweet Day is dead. 
Dark Night liath slain lier in lier bed. 
O, Moors are as fierce to kill as to wed ! 

— Put out the light, said he. 

" A sweeter light than ever rayed 
From star of heaven or eye of maid 
Has vanished in the unknown shade. 

— She 's dead, she 's dead, said he. 

" Now, in a wild, sad after-mood 
The tawny night sits still to brood 
Upon the dawn-time when he wooed. 

— I would she lived, said he. 

" Star-memories of happier times, 
Of loving deeds and lovers' rhymes, 
Throng forth in silvery pantomines. 

— Come back, O Day ! said he." 



THE SOUTH 497 

Though the allusions to " Othello " are far-fetched, and 
though the last verse evidently breaks down, the first three 
have an unmistakably lyric touch. 

Lanier's lyric quality, as w^ell as his self-imposed limitations, 
appear more clearly in a later work, which is becoming his 
most celebrated : " The Marshes of Glynn." Here his 
poetical impulse is expressed in a musical form which he 
might have called symphonic. He is no longer writing a 
song ; he is working out a complicated motive, in a manner 
so entirely his own that the first thirty-six lines, as irregular 
in form as those of Timrod's " Cotton Boll," and more ir- 
regular in length, compose one intricate, incomprehensible 
sentence. The closing passage, easier to understand, pos- 
sesses quite as much symphonic fervour. He has been 
gazing out over the marshes and trying to phrase the limit- 
less emotion which arises as he contemplates a trackless plain 
where land and sea interfuse. Then the tide begins to rise, 
and he goes on thus : — 

*' Lo, out of his plenty the sea 

Pours fast : full soon the time of the flood-tide must be : 

Look how the grace of the sea doth go 

About and about through the intricate channels that flow 

Here and there, Everywhere, 

Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying 

lanes 
And the marsh is meshed with a million veins 
That like as with rosy and silvery essences flow 
In the rose-and-silver evening glow. 

Farewell, my lord Sun ! 
The creeks overflow : a thousand rivulets run 
Twixt the roots of the sod ; the blades of the marsh-grass stir; 
Passes a hurrying sound of wings that westward whir ; 
Passes, and all is still ; and the currents cease to run ; 
And the sea and the marsh are one. 

" How still the plains of the waters be I 
The tide is in his ecstasy- 
The tide is at his highest height: 
And it is night. 

32 



498 THE REST OF THE STORY 

"■ And now from the Vast of the Lord will the waters of sleep 
Roll in on the souls of men, 
But who will reveal to our waking ken 
The forms that swim and the shapes that creep 

Under the waters of sleep? 
And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide 

comes in 
On the length and the breadth of the marvellous marshes of Glynn." 

Now this inarticulate verse is of a quality which can never 
be popular, and perhaps indeed is so eccentric that one should 
be prudent in choosing adjectives to praise it. The more you 
read the "Marshes of Glynn," however, and the more, in- 
deed, you read any of Lanier's poetry, the more certain you 
feel that he was among the truest men of letters whom our 
country has produced. Genuine in impulse, fervid in tem- 
per, impressed but not overwhelmed by the sad and tragic 
conditions of his life, and sincerely moved to write in words 
which he constantly and ardently strove to make beautiful, 
he exhibits lyric power hardly to be found in any other 
American. 

All this, however, seems hardly national. Some little 
time ago we touched on the fact that one of his most effec- 
tive narrative poems, the " Revenge of Hamish," deals with 
an episode purely Scotch. His first novel, the " Tiger Lily," 
to be sure, which has survived only in name, dealt with an 
American subject. His books for boys, however, produced 
by an impulse something like Longfellow's, were meant to 
make the brave and romantic traditions of Europe familiar to 
American youth ; his " Science of English Verse," his " Lec- 
tures on the English Novel," and the volumes of posthumous 
essays which have appeared in later years, all dealt with gen- 
eral aesthetic subjects. Lanier's earthly career was wholly 
American, and almost wholly Southern ; the emotional temper 
with which he was filled must have been quickened by experi- 
ence in our own country. The things with which he chose to 
deal, however, might have come to him anywhere. The very 



THE SOUTH 499 

fact which keeps him permanently from popularity is perhaps 
this lack of local perception, as distinguished from a temper 
which could not help being of local origin. So if Lanier's 
work tells us anything about Southern literature, it only tells 
us, a little more surely than that of Dr. Ticknor, or of Hayne, 
or of Timrod, how the tragic convulsion of our Civil War 
waked in the South a kind of passion which America had 
hardly exhibited before. 

Cursory as this glance at our Southern literature has been, it 
probably comprehends all that has been produced in the South 
by men no longer living. Reviewing it, we are compelled to 
say that our Southern regions have as yet produced little if 
any more significant literature than the North had produced 
before 1832, Since the Civil War the social and economic 
condition of the South has been too disturbed for anything 
like final expression. As yet, then, the South presents little 
to vary the general outlines of literature in America. The few 
Southern poets, however, who have phrased the emotion 
aroused by the Civil War which swept their earlier civilisa- 
tion out of existence, reveal a lyric fervour hardly yet equalled 
m the North. As one thinks, then, of Dr. Ticknor, of 
Hayne, of Timrod, and of Lanier, one begins to wonder 
whether they may not perhaps forerun a spirit which shall 
give beauty and power to the American letters of the future. 



IV 



THE WEST 

When the father of Fenimore Cooper took his family to Cen- 
tral New York, a little more than a century ago, Central New 
York was still a Western wilderness. Amid the numerous 
conventions of Cooper's Leather-Stocking stories, then, there 
emerge many traces of actual experience which show what our 
Western country used to be. In this aspect, the conclusion 
of the Leather-Stocking stories is significant. The pioneer 
hero starts alone for a wilderness more Western still, 
pressed by the inconvenient growth of population in the 
regions where he has passed his mature life. The types of 
Western immigrants thus suggested are those most frequently 
kept in mind by tradition ; and probably the most admirable 
Western settlers were on the one hand such people as the 
elder Cooper, who went to establish in a previously unbroken 
country new and grander fortunes, and, on the other hand, such 
personages as Fenimore Cooper idealised in his most popular 
hero. These latter, of whom perhaps the most familiar in 
traditional memory is Daniel Boone, were people adventur- 
ously impatient of conventions, who betook themselves with 
constantly fresh restlessness to places where, in virtue of soli- 
tude, they could live as independently as they chose. In this 
type, however, as the very popularity it achieved with Euro- 
pean revolutionists would show, there was something more like 
reversion than development. Far enough from the ideal prim- 
itive man of the French Revolution, they tended in virtues 
and in vices alike rather back towards primitive manhood than 
forward towards maturer society. As we have already seen in 



THE WEST 501 

various ways, national inexperience, which marks all Ameri- 
can history until well into the present century, had tended 
to retard the variation of our native character from the origi- 
nal type of seventeenth-century England. Such complete 
relaxation of social experience as was involved in the temper 
and conduct of the pioneers tended to throw them back toward 
the kind of human nature which had vanished from the old 
world with the middle ages. Something of the kind, indeed, 
is apparent even in remote districts of New England. In 
many parts of the West, it was once frequent enough to be 
characteristic. 

Another kind of Western settler has been less generally 
remarked. Among the New York Literati preserved from 
oblivion by Poe was Mrs. Kirkland, who happened about 1840 
to pass three or four years in Michigan, then a sparsely settled 
Western region. Between 1839 and 1846, she published 
three books dealing with her Western experiences : " A New 
Home," " Forest Life," and " Western Clearings." In them- 
selves little more than such good-humoured sketches as any 
clever, well-bred woman might write in correspondence, these 
books vividly show how the West once appeared to a cultivated 
Eastern observer. One fact which she treats as a matter of 
course is historically suggestive. When the country where 
the scene of her stories is laid began to get tamed, the more 
shiftless settlers were apt to avoid the increasing strenuous- 
ness of life by moving as much farther West as they could beg, 
borrow, or steal means to go. These personages typify an ele- 
ment of Western society which has been there from the 
beginning. That vast new region of ours has been partly 
settled, no doubt, by such admirable energy as is typified by 
the elder Cooper or Mrs. Kirkland herself. It has been 
partly settled, too, by the primitive, vigorous restlessness of the 
better sort of pioneers. Along with these admirably construc- 
tive types of character, however, there has mingled from the 
beginning a destructive type, which went West because it could 



502 THE REST OF THE STORY 

not prosper at home, and which could not prosper at home 
because it was too shiftless to prosper anywhere. 

Such a class as this, of course, is a recognised part of any 
colonising movement. Its influence on the general character 
of the West has been too little emphasised. In our older 
Northern States it is commonly supposed that at first the 
West was dominated by fine energy, and that the disturbing 
clement now evident there came either from foreign immi- 
gration or from the incursion of Southern " poor whites." In 
fact, it seems more likely that those Western regions whose 
political and moral condition now leaves most to be desired 
are those where native Northern blood preponderates. If 
this be true, the shiftless immigrants of Mrs. Kirkland's day, 
evidently what we should now call social degenerates, have 
proved a more important factor in our history than tradition 
has remembered. For in our national politics the West has 
grown, from the nature of our Constitution, to exercise an 
influence almost as disproportionate to its numerical population 
as that exercised by the slaveholding South. As the Territo- 
ries have been admitted States of the Union, each new State 
has been represented in the Senate equally with New York or 
Massachusetts, Pennsylvania or Virginia. Our national leg- 
islation, then, has had sometimes to adapt itself to the vagaries 
of these new commonwealths, whose inexperience was at the 
outset extreme, and whose wisdom — political and moral 
alike — often seems remote from recognised standards. 

Our chief concern, however, is not with politics or even 
with society ; it is rather with those aspects of feeling and 
temper which tend toward something which the West has 
not yet achieved, — namely, literary expression. Glimpses of 
these, as they appeared to foreign eyes, are to be found in the 
familiar old books of travel which formerly so incensed 
Americans against Mrs. Trollope ; and a little later in those 
caricatures of " Martin Chuzzlewit " which so displeased 
American sensibilities that American readers are prone to for- 



THE WEST 503 

get how the same book caricatures the English too, in such 
figures as Mr. Pecksniff and Mrs. Sarah Gamp. A very 
different picture of the Middle West, a little later, is to be 
found in a book which in certain moods one is disposed for 
all its eccentricity to call the most admirable work of liter- 
ary art as yet produced on this continent. This is that 
Odyssean story of the Mississippi to which Mark Twain 
gave the grotesque name of " Huckleberry Finn." The 
material from which he made this book he carelessly flung 
■together a year or two before in a rambling series of remi- 
niscences called " Life on the Mississippi." Mrs. Trollope, 
" Martin Chuzzlewit," " Life on the Mississippi," and 
"Huckleberry Finn " will combine to give a fair notion of 
Western life and character before the Civil War. 

A picture of it, from a different point of view, may be 
found in a book of which the accuracy has been questioned. 
This is a loquacious " Life of Abraham Lincoln," by Mr. 
Herndon, at one time Lincoln's partner in the practice of 
law. Without power enough either to perceive or to set forth 
the traits which made Lincoln, whatever his faults, the most 
heroic American figure of the nineteenth century, Herndon, 
an every-day Western lawyer, was thoroughly familiar with 
the society amid which Lincoln grew up, and from which he 
ultimately emerged into national public life. Herndon, too, 
was so gossipy that he could not help writing vividly. As is 
generally known, Lincoln's family history resembled that of 
the shiftless immigrants sketched by Mrs. Kirkland. That so 
admirably powerful a character could spring from such humble 
origin is generally recognised among the hopeful facts of our 
national history. Herndon's book reveals a phase of the story 
hardly evident elsewhere. As you read the incidents of Lin- 
coln's youth, whatever the authenticity of this anecdote or that, 
you can hardly avoid the impression that the social surroundings 
ih which his life began were astonishingly like those of the 
Middle Ages. These people, of course, dressed in garments, 



504 THE REST OF THE STORY 

and used words, and had traditions which imply various 
occurrences since early Plantagenet times. It is hardly 
excessive to say, however, that their general mental and moral 
condition was more like that attributed to the English peas- 
antry in the days of Richard Coeur de Lion than like any native 
English existence much more recent. Amid the relaxed 
inexperience of Western life the lower sort of Americans had 
tended to revert towards a social state ancestrally extinct cen- 
turies before America was discovered. During Lincoln's career 
the West was rapidly settling ; and as you read Herndon you 
have a curious sense that months and years are doing the work 
of generations and centuries. It is as if in 1809 Lincoln had 
been born under King Richard I. ; and when the man was 
fifty years old, he was abreast of our own time. One thing 
which contributed to his amazing power was this exceptional 
social environment, of which Herndon's book gives so vivid a 
picture. Almost alone of eminent Americans, Lincoln had 
chanced to know the inexperience of our native country in 
almost all its phases. 

In our Western regions this extraordinary confusion of the 
centuries is not yet past. The essay which Mr. Owen Wister 
has prefixed to his stories, "Red Men and White," points out 
that in the Far West there are still regions of which the civili- 
sation is much less mature than that of Elizabethan England. 
Everybody knows that our national government has somehow 
to reconcile the purposes and interests of societies widely dif- 
ferent in climatic conditions and historic origin. Even New 
England and New York differ in some respects ; both alike 
differ from the older Southern colonies; and the Northwest 
differs from the Southwest, and Louisiana from everything 
else; and so do the regions of Spanish origin. Mr. Wister 
points out the less salient fact that varying phases of Ameri- 
can Inexperience have thrown certain parts of our country 
back into the Middle Ages, while others amid accumulating 
experience have advanced to fully modern conditions. The 



THE WEST 505 

problem of our national politics, then, is even more compli- 
cated than it has seemed ; we must reconcile differences 
which extend not only through widely divergent space, but 
also through generations and centuries of social and historic 
time. 

From the causes at which we have glanced, two or three 
familiar results have followed. A hundred years ago, the 
greater part of our country was still a wilderness, and Central 
New York itself a region where native Indians still lingered. 
To-day, it is said, almost every available acre throughout the 
United States is in private ownership j and regions which 
within living memory were still unbroken prairie are the sites of 
cities more populous than New York or Boston was fifty years 
ago. From influences quite beyond human control, then, the 
energies of our Western people have devoted themselves to 
the conquest of Nature on a scale hitherto unattempted. No 
wonder the most salient trait of our great confused West seems 
enthusiasm for material prosperity as distinguished from spiritual 
or intellectual ideals. Yet there are such things as Western 
ideals, different from the older ideals of New England, but per- 
haps as admirable. Though these have not yet expressed them- 
selves in literary form, they assumed, some few years ago, a 
plastic form which must deeply have impressed any one who 
saw it. 

When, in 1893, ^^^ World's Fair was held at Chicago, one 
might have expected colossal crudity of taste. The archi- 
tects of the buildings, to be sure, were not always Western 
men ; but the controlling spirit which enabled the architect- 
ural energy of America to concentrate itself in an imagina- 
tive effort hitherto unapproached came almost wholly from 
Chicago. The structures which grew from this spirit and 
energy became an imaginatively stimulating expression of 
noble aesthetic temper. Whatever their imperfection of 
detail, they were imperially beautiful. That transitory city, 
too, which the energy of western America thus for a moment 



506 THE REST OF THE STORY 

created, had a transitory population drawn mostly from those 
regions which we still call Western. For the expense and 
difficulty of long journeys weighed more and more on people 
from a distance. As you watched this passing population 
day by day, you felt growing surprise and admiration at their 
simplicity of feeling, their eagerness to delight in excellence, 
and their cheerful observance of public order. For one thing, 
— a mere detail, — there is a general feeling among the 
ordinary people of America that the sale of intoxicating drink 
must necessarily lead to wide-spread drunkenness, — whence 
the prohibitory legislation so frequently vexatious to civilised 
travellers in the United States. At the Chicago Exhibition, 
intoxicating drinks were freely sold ; and the daily visitors num- 
bered hundreds of thousands. They were people, too, of widely 
various social origin. Yet there was hardly more evidence of 
drunkenness than if the vice had never existed. The general 
manner of the crowd, too, though lacking the unconscious grace 
which one finds in gatherings of older nations, was good- 
humoured and polite. If the citizens from the four corners of 
the West who came to Chicago during those few weeks may 
be taken as typical of western America, the West is a region 
from which in time to come we may hope for broader and 
more superbly imaginative expression than any which America 
has hitherto known. 

As yet, however, this great confused West has not devel- 
oped any such unity of character as has marked our elder 
regions ; and happily most of the writers who pleasantly and 
worthily express certain aspects of Western life are still living. 
On the serious literature of the West, then, we cannot touch in 
detail. Its chief feature seems to be those short stories which 
set forth with accuracy, if not with lasting vitality, the local 
characteristics of California or of Kentucky, of Arkansas, of 
Arizona, or of wherever else. In Chicago, meantime, at this 
moment the most populous and characteristic Western city, 
there is considerable publication ; and this includes a fort- 



THE WEST 507 

nightly paper, the " Dial," which seems at present the most 
unbiassed, good-humoured, and sensible organ of American 
criticism. In general, however, Western literary expression 
is still confined to popular journalism. 

Though American newspapers, particularly of that ex- 
tremely unacademic kind popular in the West, can hardly be 
brought within any definition of literature, they form, for better 
or worse, the only habitual reading of most native Americans. 
Offensive though they generally be to taste, then, and often 
to civic morals as well. Western newspapers are significant in 
such considerations as ours. Their most obvious trait is sen- 
sationalism. So long as news is exciting, they care little 
whether it prove true. In a deliberate effort to please an 
untutored public, they do not hesitate to play on every passing 
prejudice of the moment ; and, written for the most part by 
people of small education, often mere boys, their style in 
every phase but one is apt to be thoroughly vicious. Almost 
all, however, display one merit which atones for numberless 
errors ; almost all are readable, to a degree which even 
educated minds find insidiously attractive. 

As you grow familiar with American newspapers, it appears 
that besides their chief function of purveying news in a man- 
ner welcome to uneducated readers they undertake to provide 
such readers with fragmentary matter of which the substance 
comes nearer to literature. In recognised " departments," you 
will find many items of general information ; many scraps of 
verse, too, some of which approaches poetry ; and, above all, 
in most papers of much pretension you are apt to find regular 
contributions intended simply to make you laugh. 

Mainly from this source, — the comic columns of American 
newspapers, — there has tended to develop a kind of native 
expression hardly recognised forty years ago and now popu- 
larly supposed to be our most characteristic. This is what 
is commonly called American humour. 

Some vein of humour, of course, has existed in America 



5o8 THE REST OF THE STORY 

almost from the beginning. In the admirable analytic index 
of Stedman and Hutchinson's " Library of American Litera- 
ture," American humour is held to have existed as early as 
1647, when Nathaniel Ward, minister of Ipswich, published 
his " Simple Cobbler of Agawam," a work which contains 
satirical sketches of character in the regular seventeenth- 
century manner. There was plenty of conventional humour, 
too, in the literature of the American Revolution. Hopkin- 
son's " Battle of the Kegs," however, the most familiar ex- 
ample of this, needs only comparison with Cowper's nearly 
contemporary " John Gilpin " to reveal that its chief American 
trait is a somewhat unskilful touch. Franklin's humour was 
somewhat more national ; that letter of his to a London news- 
paper, about 1760, proved the most hard-headed and versatile 
of eighteenth-century Americans to have been capable of a 
grave confusion of fact and nonsense which reminds one of 
Mark Twain's. Among our acknowledged men of letters, in 
later days, several have won recognition largely by means of 
their humorous passages. Irving's " Knickerbocker," for 
example, founded his reputation by just such confusion of literal 
statement with extravagance as made Franklin's letter amus- 
ing fifty years before and Mark Twain's " Innocents Abroad " 
fifty years later; in all three, you are constantly perplexed as 
to what is so and what not. Something of the same kind 
you find again in Lowell's "Fable for Critics" and his 
" Biglow Papers." The humour of Parson Wilbur's intermi- 
nable introductions, to be sure, seems mostly of the ponderous 
old English type ; but the verses themselves, amid all their 
extravagance of dialect and puns, now and again state grave 
truths in solemnly plain terms, and sometimes rise into noble 
poetry. In the " Monument and the Bridge," the last of 
Lowell's poems at which we happened to glance, these traits 
are instantly apparent. Holmes, too, was so humorous in 
temper that when, during his last visit to England, he had 
the pleasure of seeing his portrait in " Vanity Fair," he 



THE WEST 509 

must have felt quiet amusement at the brief biography which 
accompanied it with the statement that so conservative a 
Boston gentleman was a typically American " funny fellow." 

No criticism could have shown much less understanding 
of Holmes's real position in our letters. Like Lowell and 
Irving, and in many respects Franklin himself, Holmes was 
not only American in his humorous habit of shifting from 
seriousness to burlesque, and from burlesque back to serious- 
ness, at moments when you least expected ; but, like almost 
all American men of letters in his generation, he was a man 
of distinction. Whatever the strength or the weakness of 
the writers whom we have considered, their fun, like their 
seriousness and their commonplace, is of the sort which char- 
acterises gentlemen. Democratic though our country be, 
those actually recognised as our men of letters, even if, like 
Franklin or Whittier, of simple origin, have generally pos- 
sessed in their ripeness a personal dignity, at once conscious 
and willingly acknowledged. In momentarily distinguished 
form, then, American humour first declared itself. The form 
which has been developing in Western newspapers has other 
traits. 

The chief of these, which is inherent in the popularity of 
Western journalism, is hard to define, but palpable and 
vital. It amounts to a general assumption that everybody 
whom you address will entirely understand whatever you say. 
Such an assumption implies broad human feeling. We all 
know that men differ not only in temperament, but also in 
accordance with the conditions of their lives ; and most of us 
are over-conscious of such differences. Now and again, how- 
ever, you come across somebody who contagiously assumes 
that for all our differences every human being is really human, 
and so that everybody's emotions, sublime or ridiculous, may 
generally be excited in the same way. A familiar example of 
the temper now in mind pervaded a kind of entertainment fre- 
quent in America thirty or forty years ago, — the negro min- 



5IO THE REST OF THE STORY 

strel shows, now tending to vanish in performances like those 
of London music halls. In these shows a number of men 
would daub their faces with burnt cork, would dress themselves 
in preposterous burlesque of the florid taste still characteristic 
of negroes, and sitting in a row would sing songs and tell 
stories. The songs were sometimes sentimental, the stories 
almost always extravagantly comic ; but underlying one and all 
was an assumption that everybody who heard what the per- 
formers said was familiar with everything they knew, — not 
only with local allusions and human nature, but also with the 
very names and personal oddities of the individuals they men- 
tioned. To phrase the thing colloquially, the whole perform- 
ance assumed that we were all in the crowd. You will find 
a touch of this temper in FalstafF, plenty of it in Sancho 
Panza ; you will find it, too, in the conventional personages 
of the old European stage, — Policinello or Sganarelle ; you 
will find it in the mountebanks who have plied their trade 
throughout human history. This temper is obviously akin to 
that broadly human feeling which underlies all great works of 
lasting art. The more we can assume that everybody is 
human, the more human our literary work will be. 

Some such trait as this pervades the " funny " columns of 
American newspapers, particularly in the West ; and it is 
mostly from these columns that American humour has emerged 
into what approach it has made to literary form. Generally, 
of course, this humour, like other recent phases of American 
expression, has come from men still living, and so is beyond 
our range ; but at least three familiar humorous figures who 
are no longer with us typify the kind of literary impulse now 
in mind. The first was George Horatio Derby, an army 
officer, born of a good Massachusetts family in 1823, who 
spent a good deal of his life in the West, particularly in Cali- 
fornia. Here, under the name of John Phoenix, he took to 
writing whimsical letters for the newspapers, two volumes of 
which had been collected and published before his death in 



THE WEST 511 

1 86 1. In their day, " PhcEnixiana " and the " Squibob Pa- 
pers," which grotesquely satirise life in California during the 
early days of American control there, were popular all over 
the country. To-day one feels their extravagance more than 
their fun ; the whole thing seems overdone. John Phoenix, 
however, was undoubtedly among the earliest humourists of a 
school which has tended to produce better and better work. 

About ten years after his time there came into notice a man 
whose name is still remembered both at home and in Eng- 
land. This was Charles Farrar Browne, born at Waterford, 
Maine, in 1834. At first a printer, then a newspaper man, 
he drifted to Ohio, where about 1858 he became a reporter 
on the Cleveland " Plain Dealer." For this he began to 
write, over the signature of Artemus Ward, humorous articles 
which carried both the " Plain Dealer " and his pseudonym 
all over the country. Just before the Civil War he took 
charge of a comic weekly newspaper in New York. The 
war brought this venture to an end ; for the rest of his life 
he was a " funny " lecturer ; he died in England on a lecturing 
tour in 1867. Like the humour of John Phoenix, that of 
Artemus Ward now seems tediously extravagant ; but the 
essence of it lies in his inextricable confusion of fact and non- 
sense. He often assumes the character of a travelling show- 
man, remotely resembling the late Mr. Barnum, in which 
character he has interviews not only with typical individuals 
of various classes, but with all sorts of notable persons, from 
Brigham Young to Oueen Victoria. With all these he is on 
the most intimate terms ; the fun lies chiefly in the grotesque 
incongruity between the persons concerned and what they say. 
Like Lowell in the " Biglow Papers," he emphasised his jests 
with mad misspelling and the like ; but all his vagaries cannot 
conceal the sober confusion of fact and nonsense which groups 
his temper with that of Lowell and Irving and the other 
humourists of our standard literature. Essentially, however, as 
we have seen, Lowell and Irving and Holmes and the rest were 



512 THE REST OF THE STORY 

gentlemen and men of taste ; poor Artemus Ward was neither. 
Personally he is said to have been so far from reputable that 
even in his palmy days as a Cleveland reporter the better sort 
of people in that Ohio city let him severely alone; and 
throughout the volumes in w^hich his newspaper articles were 
from time to time collected, although you find no indecency, 
you will find no vestige of taste. The extreme extravagance 
of Artemus Ward, however, peculiarly commended him to 
many readers in England, who found his work so different 
from what they were used to, that they welcomed him as 
characteristically American. 

In the history of American newspaper humour the grotesque 
extravagance of Artemus Ward stands midway between that 
of John Phoenix and that of the writers who are still at work. 
The personal career of the man, no longer living, who may be 
taken to represent this later stage of development resembled 
that of Artemus Ward. David Ross Locke was born in a 
country village of New York in 1833. Like Artemus Ward, 
he was a printer, later a reporter, and later still, editor of a 
local newspaper in Ohio. At the beginning of the Civil 
War he began to write political satires over the signature of 
Petroleum V. Nasby. The preposterousness of this pseu- 
donym typifies the absurdity of his misspelt and otherwise 
eccentric style. His satire, however, which was widely cir- 
culated at a moment of national crisis, dealt with matters of 
significance. He had come intimately to know the border 
regions between the North and the South. He was a strong 
Union man ; and with all the grotesque mannerisms of a news- 
paper humourist he satirised Southern character and those phases 
of Northern character which sympathised with the constitu- 
tional contentions of the Confederacy. Nasby's work, then, 
had in its day political importance ; it really helped solidify 
and strengthen Union sentiment. In 1865, Mr. Locke be- 
came editor of the "Toledo Blade;" and he survived at 
Toledo, Ohio, until 1888. His work as a humourist, however. 



THE WEST S13 

belongs to the Civil War and to the disturbed ensuing ad- 
ministration of President Johnson, against whom some of his 
most pitiless satire was directed. The Nasby letters purport 
to come from a place called " Confederate X-Roads," and to 
be written by a good-for-nothing Southern politician with no 
redeeming trait except a Falstaffian presumption that every- 
body will agree with him. Addressing himself directly to the 
every-day readers of an Ohio newspaper, and popular through- 
out the Northern States, Nasby was at once a characteristic 
newspaper humourist and a satirist of considerable power. 
His work, then, has considerable interest for students of 
American political history. 

Though, in general, American newspaper humour is not so 
significant, it has retained from Nasby's day the sort of con- 
tagious vitality found throughout his writings ; and in one or 
two cases of men still living it has emerged into something 
more notable. In one case, indeed, it has resulted in literary 
work so characteristically American, and so widely varied, 
that while happily the author in question is not yet a posthu- 
mous subject for such study as ours, it is impossible not to men- 
tion his name. If there be any contemporary work at once 
thoroughly American, and, for all its errors of taste, full of 
indications that the writer's power would have been exceptional 
anywhere, it is that of Mr. Clemens, more widely known as 
Mark Twain. 

On the whole, however, we may say of our great confused 
West, that just as surely as New England has made its mark 
in the literary history of America, so as yet this West has not. 
Its general literary condition resembles that of the South, and 
of New York in the days which have followed the Knicker- 
bocker School. Its varied, swiftly changing life has not yet 
ripened into an experience which can possibly find lasting 
expression. 



V 

THE PRESENT TIME 

So at last we come to the question of what America is doing 
in literature to-day. At this, of course, we must glance very 
generally. Living men, we decided long ago, are not withm 
the scope of our study ; we may properly inquire only what 
literary symptoms we discern in our new nation, which almost 
within our own time has tamed and settled the American con- 
tinent from sea to sea. 

Old New York, we saw, expressed itself in our first 
school of renascent writing, which withered away with the 
" Knickerbocker Magazine j " and modern New York seems 
doing little more than contemplate the forces from which by 
and by some newer and deeper literature may emerge. New 
England ripened into renascent expression ; but its Renais- 
sance is now a thing of the past, and in many aspects the 
New England of to-day seems otherwise past its prime. In 
the older South, literature was never highly developed ; and 
the Civil War is hardly yet so remote as to allow the new 
South to have declared its final character. The West, too, 
has not yet reached maturity. The America of the future, 
however, seems likely to be a country in which the forces which 
have gathered separately may finally fuse into a centralised 
nationality more conscious and more powerful than we have 
yet known. It becomes Interesting, then, to inquire what 
literary symptoms, if any, are common to our whole country, 
what kind of expression is now familiar throughout it. 

The newspaper we have seen, for one thing, crude, sensa- 
tional, and mostly addressed to the unthinking classes. It 



THE PRESENT TIME 515 

emerges into literary quality, if at all, only in the form of a 
reckless humour whose history shows something like develop- 
ment. This humour is always extravagant, generally deficient 
in taste, and mostly ephemeral ; but its underlying trait seems 
like that of the humour which has enlivened our standard 
literature. Our American temper has a shrewd sense of fact. 
Its instinctive conception of fun seems to lie in a preposter- 
ous confusion of hard fact with wild nonsense, complicated 
and freshly confused by a superficially grave manner. Its 
jumps from serious things to things which no human being 
could take seriously, and back again, are incalculably sudden. 
What looks like a vital trait in all this is the tendency among 
the " funny men " of our newspapers to deal with fact in grow- 
ingly mature spirit. Artemus Ward came nearer life than 
John Phoenix, Nasby than Artemus Ward ; and, on the whole, 
the more recent of our newspaper humourists seem rather more 
firmly poised than Nasby. So far, this phase of American 
literature has produced nothing which can reasonably be ex- 
pected to last. From this broadly popular origin, however, 
may perhaps come in future some lasting development. At 
least, if a man should appear in America with such gifts as 
now and again have made the humourists of other countries 
''mmortal, that man would find ready a vehicle of expression 
and a public which might help him to produce works of humour 
at once permanent and characteristically national. 

Though newspapers are incalculably the most popular 
vehicles of modern American expression, there are other such 
vehicles generally familiar to our educated classes. The prin- 
cipal of these are the illustrated monthly magazines published 
in New York. These, which circulate by hundreds of thou- 
sands, and go from one end of the country to the other, pro- 
vide the ordinary American citizen of to-day with his nearest 
approach to literature. A glance through any volume of any 
of them will show that the literary form which most luxuri- 
antly flourishes in their pages is the short story. This de- 



5i6 THE REST OF THE STORY 

velopment of short stories is partly a question of business. 
Short stories have usually been more profitable to writers and 
more convenient to editors than long novels ; and at this moment 
poetry seems not to appeal to any considerable public taste. 
Partly, how^ever, this prevalence of short stories seems nation- 
ally characteristic of American as distinguished from English 
men of letters. Of late, no doubt, England has produced one 
or two writers who do this kind of work extraordinarily well ; 
there is no living American, for example, whose stories equal 
those of Mr. Kipling j but Mr. Kipling, a remarkable master of 
this difficult literary form, is a comparatively new phenomenon 
in English literature. From the days of Washington Irving, 
on the other hand, Americans have shown themselves able to 
write short stories rather better than anything else. The older 
short stories of America — Irving's and Poe's and even Haw- 
thorne's — were generally romantic in both impulse and man- 
ner. Accordingly, however local their sentiment may have 
been, and however local in certain cases their descriptive pas- 
sages, they were not precisely documents from which local 
conditions might be inferred. The short stories of modern 
Americans differ from these by being generally realistic in im- 
pulse and local in detail. We have stories of decaying New 
England, stories of the Middle West, stories of the Ohio 
region and Chicago stories, stories of the Southwest, stories of 
the Rocky Mountains and of California, of Virginia and of 
Georgia. In plot these generally seem conventionally insig- 
nificant. Their characters, too, have hardly reached such 
development as to become recognised national types. These 
characters, however, are often typical of the regions which 
have suggested them ; and the description of these regions is 
frequently rendered in elaborate detail with workmanlike 
effectiveness. On the whole, like all the literature of the 
moment, in England and in America alike, these short stories 
lack distinction. The people who write them, one is apt to 
feel, are not Olympian in temper, but Bohemian. Our Amer- 



THE PRESENT TIME 517 

lean Bohemia, however, is not quite like that of the old world ; 
at least, it is free from the kind of recklessness which one so 
often associates with such regions; and the writing of our 
Bohemians preserves something of that artistic conscience 
which always makes the form of careful American work finer 
than that of prevalent work in the old country. In the short 
stories of American magazines, then, so familiar throughout 
the United States, we have a second type of popular literature 
not at present developed into masterly form, but ready to afford 
both a vehicle and a public to any writer of masterly power 
who may arise. 

We have glanced at two of the forms which seem growing 
to literary ripeness in America, — the newspaper and the pop- 
ular magazine. There is only one other form whose present 
popularity is anything like so considerable ; this is the stage. 
So far, to be sure, the American theatre has produced no work 
which can claim serious consideration. During the last half- 
century, on the other hand, the American stage has developed 
all over the country a popularity and an organisation which 
seem favourable to serious expression in the future. At the 
beginning of this century there were very few theatres in the 
United States ; in many places, indeed, the popular prejudice 
against the stage was as blind as that of the Puritans who closed 
the English theatres in 1642. To-day travelling dramatic 
companies patrol the continent. Every town has its theatre, 
and every theatre its audience. Until now, to be sure, the plays 
most popular in America have generally come straight from 
Europe, and the plays made here have been apt unintelligently 
to follow European models. Now and again, however, there 
have appeared signs that various types of American character 
could be represented on the stage with great popular effect; 
and the rapid growth of the American theatre has provided us 
with an increasing number of skilful actors. A large though 
thoughtless public of theatre-goers, a school of professional 
actors who can intelligently present a wide variety of character, 



5i8 THE REST OF THE STORY 

and a tendency on the part of American theatrical men to pro- 
duce, amid stupidly conventional surroundings, vivid studies 
from life, again represent conditions of promise. If a drama- 
tist of commanding power should arise in this country, he 
might find ready more than a few of the conditions from 
which lasting dramatic literatures have flashed into existence. 

At this moment newspaper humour, the short stories of the 
magazines, and the popular stage seem the sources from which 
a characteristic American literature is most likely to spring. 
The America of the future can probably be expressed only in 
some broadly popular form ; and these three forms are the only 
ones which at present seem to promise broad popularity. At 
present, however, none of these forms, any more than the 
traditional forms which flourished earlier, are copiously fruit- 
ful. In America, as in England, and indeed as in all Europe, 
the last years of the nineteenth century have seemed artis- 
tically less important, less significant, less lasting, than those 
which lately preceded. The world is passing through expe- 
rience too confused, too troubled, too uncertain, for ripe 
expression ; and America seems more and more growing to 
be just another part of the world. 



CONCLUSION 



CONCLUSION 

The literary history of America is the story, under new 
conditions, of those ideals which a common language has 
compelled America, almost unawares, to share with England. 
Elusive though they be, ideals are the souls of the nations 
which cherish them, — the living spirits which waken nation- 
ality into being, and which often preserve its memory long 
after its life has ebbed away. Denied by the impatience 
which will not seek them where they smoulder beneath the 
cinders of cant, derided by the near-sighted wisdom which is 
content with the world-old commonplace of how practice 
must always swerve from precept, they mysteriously, resur- 
gently persist. 

The ideals which for three hundred years America and 
England have cherished, alike yet apart, are ideals of morality 
and of government, — of right and of rights. Whoever has 
lived his conscious life in the terms of our language, so satu- 
rated with the temper and the phrases both of the English 
Bible and of English Law, has perforce learned that, how- 
ever he may stray, he cannot escape the duty which 
bids us do right and maintain our rights. General as these 
phrases must seem, — common at first glance to the serious 
moments of all men everywhere, — they have, for us of Eng- 
lish-speaking race, a meaning peculiarly our own. Though 
Englishmen have prated enough and to spare, and though 
Americans have declaimed about human rights more nebu- 
lously still, the rights for which Englishmen and Americans 
alike have been eager to fight and to die are no prismatic 
fancies gleaming through clouds of conflicting logic and 
metaphor; they are that living body of customs and duties 



522 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

and privileges, which a process very like physical growth has 
made the vital condition of our national existence. Through 
immemorial experience, the rights which we most jealously 
cherish have proved themselves safely favourable at once 
to prosperity and to righteousness. 

Threatened throughout history, both from without and 
from within, these rights can be preserved by nothing short 
of eternal vigilance. In this we have been faithful, until 
our deepest ideal of public duty, which marks Englishmen and 
Americans apart from others, and side by side, has long 
ago defined itself. The vitally growing rights bequeathed 
us by our fathers, we must protect, not only from invasion 
or aggression attempted by other races than ours, but also 
from the internal ravages both of reaction and of revolution. 
In loyalty to this conception of duty, the nobler minds of 
England and of America have always been at one. 

Yet to careless eyes the two countries have long seemed 
parted by a chasm wider even than the turbulent and foggy 
Atlantic. Wide it has surely been, but never so vague as 
to interpose between them the shoreless gulf of sundered 
principle. The differences which have kept England and 
America so long distinct have arisen from no more fatal 
cause than unwitting and temporary conflicts of their common 
law. The origin of both countries, as we know them to-day, 
was the England of Queen Elizabeth, with all its sponta- 
neity, all its enthusiasm, all its untired versatility. From this 
origin England has sped faster and further than America. 
Throughout two full centuries, then, America and England 
have faithfully, honestly quarrelled as to just what rights and 
liberties were truly sanctioned by the law which has remained 
common to both. 

How their native tempers began to diverge we have 
already seen. During the seventeenth century, England 
proceeded from its spontaneous, enthusiastic Elizabethan ver- 
satility, through the convulsions of the Civil Wars, to 



CONCLUSION 523 

Cromwell's Commonwealth ; and from the Commonwealth, 
through the baseness of the Restoration and the renewing 
health of the Glorious Revolution, to that state of parliament- 
ary government which, in vitally altering form, still persists. 
English literature meanwhile proceeded from the age of 
Shakspere, through the age of Milton, to the age of Dryden. 
During this same seventeenth century, — the century of 
American immigration, — the course of American history 
was interrupted by no such convulsion as the wars and 
tumults which destroyed Elizabethan England. American 
character, then, which from the beginning possessed its still 
persistent power of absorbing immigration, preserved much 
of the spontaneity, the enthusiasm, and the versatility trans- 
ported hither from the mother country when Virginia and 
New England were founded. So far as literature went, 
meantime, seventeenth-century America expressed itself 
only in occasional historical records, and in a deluge 
of Calvinistic theology. Though long since abated, these 
first outpourings of New England have left indelible traces. 
Partly to them, and still more to the devout source from 
which they welled, is due the instinctive devotion of America 
to such ideals of absolute right and truth as were inherent 
in the passionate idealism of the Puritans. 

It was here that America most distinctly parted from the 
mother country. In England, the Puritan Commonwealth, 
with its nobly futile aspiration toward absolute right, so en- 
twined itself about the life of Cromwell that when he died 
it fell. In America a similar commonwealth, already deeply 
rooted when Cromwell was still a sturdy country gentleman of 
St. Ives, flourished fruitful long after his relics had been cast 
out of Westminster Abbey. Generation by generation, the 
immemorial custom of America, wherein America has steadily 
discerned the features of its ancestral rights and liberties, grew 
insensibly to sanction more abstract ideals than ever long per- 
sisted in England. 



524 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

Whoever will thus interpret the seventeenth century need 
be at little pains to understand the century which followed. 
The political events of this eighteenth century — the century 
of American independence — forced England into prolonged 
international isolation ; and this, combined with reactionary 
desire for domestic order, bred in British character that insular 
conservatism still typified by the portly, repellent integrity of 
John Bull. English literature meanwhile proceeded from the 
Addisonian urbanity of Queen Anne's time, through the pon- 
derous Johnsonian formality which satisfied the subjects of 
George II., to the masterly publicism of Burke and the 
contagious popularity of Burns. 

Eighteenth-century America was politically free from the 
conditions which so highly developed the peculiar eccentricities 
of England. There is no wonder, then, that American char- 
acter still retained the spontaneity, the enthusiasm, and the ver- 
satility of the elder days when it had shared these traits with 
the English. Nor is there any wonder that Americans went 
on traditionally cherishing the fervent idealism of the immi- 
grant Puritans, wherein for a while the ancestral English ideals 
of right and of rights had fused. Unwittingly lingering in 
its pristine state, the native character of America became 
less and less like the character which historical forces were 
irresistibly moulding in the mother country. The traditional 
law of America — the immemorial rights, the customs and the 
liberties, of a newly conscious people eagerly responsive to the 
allurements of absolute truth — seemed on its surface less and 
less like the more dogged and rigid system which was becom- 
ing the traditional law of England. When disputes arose, the 
spirit of old Babel was reawakened. Despite their common 
language, neither of the kindred peoples, separated not only 
by the wastes of the ocean but also by the forgotten lapse of five 
generations, could rightly understand the other. Dispute 
waxed fruitlessly high. The inevitable result was the American 
Revolution. 



CONCLUSION 525 

The same causes which wrought this imperial disunion had 
tended to alter the literary character of America. American 
theology had already evaporated in metaphysical abstraction j its 
place, as the principal phase of American expression, had been 
taken by politics. Of this, no doubt, the animating ideal was 
not so much that of morality as that of law ; the writings of 
eighteenth-century America have less concern with right than 
with rights. Yet America would not have been America unless 
these ancestral ideals had remained blended. A yearning for 
absolute truth, an unbroken faith in abstract ideals, Is what 
makes distinctly national the political utterances of the Amer- 
ican Revolution. The love of abstract right which pervades 
them sprang straight from that aspiration toward absolute truth 
which had animated the grim idealism of the Puritans. 

So came the nineteenth century, — the century of American 
nationality, when, for all their community of language and of 
ideals, England and America have believed themselves mutually 
foreign. English history has proceeded from the extreme iso- 
lation which ended at Waterloo, through the constitutional 
revolution of the Reform Bill to the present reign. What the 
future may decide to have been the chief features of this Vic- 
torian epoch, it is still too soon to assert; yet, whatever else, 
the future can hardly fail to remember how, throughout these 
sixty and more years, England has continually developed in 
two seemingly divergent ways. At home, on the one hand, it 
has so tended toward democracy that already the political 
power of the English masses probably exceeds that of the 
American. In its world relations, on the other hand, England 
has become imperial to a degree undreamed of when Queen 
Victoria ascended the throne. Wherever the influence of 
England extends to-day, democracy and empire go hand in 
hand. 

Throughout this nineteenth century, America has had the 
Western Hemisphere almost to itself. This it has dominated 
with increasing material power, believing all the while that it 



526 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

could keep free from entanglement with other regions of the 
earth. From this youthful dream it has at last been rudely 
awakened. In the dawning of a new century, it finds itself — 
like England, at once democratic and imperial — inevitably 
confronted with world conflict ; either its ideals must prevail, 
or they must perish. After three centuries of separation, then, 
England and America are once more side by side. With 
them, in union, lies the hope of imperial democracy. 

It is only during the nineteenth century — the century of 
American nationality — that America has brought forth liter- 
ature. First appearing in the Middle States, this soon devel- 
oped more seriously in New England, whose mental life, so 
active at first, had lain comparatively dormant for almost a 
hundred years. These two phases of American literary ex- 
pression, the only ones which may as yet be regarded, as com- 
plete, have been the chief subject of our study. On the im- 
pression which they have left with us must rest our estimate of 
what the literature produced in America has hitherto signified. 

To define this impression, we may helpfully glance back at 
what the nineteenth century added to the literature of Eng- 
land. First came the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge 
and Shelley and Keats and Byron, — a poetry, for all its 
individual variety, aflame with the spirit of world-revolution. 
Then, just after Waterloo, came those bravely ideal retro- 
spective romances which have immortalised the name of 
Scott. He died In 1832, the year of the Reform Bill. The 
later literature of England has expressed the meanings of life 
discerned and felt by men whose mature years have fallen 
within the democratic and imperial reign of Queen Victoria. 
This literature includes the great modern novelists, — Dick- 
ens and Thackeray and George Eliot, with their host of con- 
temporaries and followers ; it includes the poetry of Tennyson, 
and of the Brownings, and of more ; it includes a wealth of 
serious prose, the work of Macaulay, of Carlyle, of Ruskin, of 
Newman, of Matthew Arnold, and of numberless others ; it 



CONCLUSION 527 

includes the studied and fastidious refinement of Steven- 
son ; it still happily includes the scope and power of writers 
now living. 

In the nineteenth century English literature began with a 
passionate outburst of aspiring romantic poetry ; it passed into 
an era of retrospective romantic prose ; it proceeded to a 
stage where, for all the merit of persistent poetry, the chief 
fact seems to have been fiction dealing mostly with contempo- 
rary life; its serious prose, all the while, tended more and 
more to dwell on the problems of the times ; and these surely 
underlie the utterances of its latest masters. The more one 
considers what the century has added to English literature, the 
more one marvels at its riches. Yet all the while one grows 
aware of something which, if not a loss, is at least a change. 
Throughout the century, English letters have slowly lapsed 
away from the grace of personal distinction. The literature 
of nineteenth-century England, like its history, expresses an 
irresistible advance of democracy 

Political democracy, no doubt, declared itself earlier and 
more outspokenly in America than in England. So far as 
literature is concerned, on the other hand, the first thirty 
years of the nineteenth century excited from America much 
less democratic utterances than came from the revolutionary 
poets of the mother country. If you doubt this, compare 
Brockden Brown with Wordsworth, Irving with Coleridge, 
Cooper with Shelley, Bryant with Byron. What that earlier 
literature of the Middle States chiefly certifies of American 
character is the trait which so far has most surely controlled 
the progress of the United States : whatever our vagaries of 
occasional speech, we Americans are at heart disposed, with good 
old English common-sense, to follow those lines of conduct 
which practice has proved safe and which prudence has pro- 
nounced admirable. The earlier literature of the Middle 
States has another trait which seems nationally characteristic : 
its sensitiveness of artistic conscience shows Americans gener- 



528 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

ally to be more alive to artistic duty than Englishmen have 
often been. The first literary utterances of inexperienced 
America were marked by no wildness 6r vagary ; they showed, 
rather, an almost timid loyalty to the traditions of excellence. 

A few years later came what so far seems the nearest ap- 
proach of America to lasting literature, — the final utterances 
of New England during the years of its Renaissance, which, 
broadly speaking, were contemporary with the first half of the 
reign of Queen Victoria. The new Hfe had begun, of course, 
somewhat earlier. It had first shown itself in the awaken- 
ing of New England oratory and scholarship, and in the ardour 
which stirred Unitarianism to break the fetters of Calvinistic 
dogma. Scholarship bore fruit in the later works of the New 
England historians. Unitarianism tended, through Tran- 
scendentalism, to militant, disintegrating reform. Amid these 
freshening intellectual surroundings appeared some men whose 
names seem destined at least for a while to live in the records 
of literature. The chief of these were Emerson and Whit- 
tier and Longfellow and Lowell and Holmes and Hawthorne. 
If you will compare them with the writers who in their time 
were most eminent in England, — with Dickens, Thackeray, 
and George Eliot, with Tennyson and the Brownings, with 
Carlyle and Ruskin, with Newman and Matthew Arnold, — 
you can hardly help feeling a difference, palpable even though 
indistinct, undeniable even though hard to define. 

One phase of this difference soon grows clear. Though 
the writers of renascent New England were generally better 
in prose than in poetry, — and thus resembled their English 
contemporaries, — their spirit was rather like that which had 
animated the fervent English poetry of a generation before. 
One and all of them, accepting the revolutionary doctrine that 
human nature is not evil but good, confidently hoped that 
illimitable development was at hand for a humanity finally 
freed from the shackles of outworn custom. In this faith and 
hope, the men of the New England Renaissance were sustained 



CONCLUSION 529 

by a fact never true of any other civilised society than that 
from which they sprung. For more than two hundred years, 
national inexperience had protected American character from 
such distortion as the pressure of dense population always 
twists into human nature. With a justified enthusiasm, then, 
the literary leaders of New England, full of the earnest ideal- 
ism inseparable from their Puritan ancestry, and finally es- 
caped from the dogmas which had reviled humanity, fervently 
proclaimed democracy. And here, at first, their temper seems 
to linger a little behind that of the mother country. The 
undimmed confidence of their faith in human nature is like 
that which was beginning to fade from English literature 
before the death of Scott. 

Yet these New England writers were no mere exotic 
survivors of the days when English Romanticism was fervid. 
They were all true Americans ; and this they could not have 
been without an almost rustic limitation of v/orldly knowledge, 
without a shrewd sense of fact which should at once correct 
the errors of such ignorance and check the vagaries of their 
idealism, or without exacting artistic conscience. Their devo- 
tion to the ideals of right and of rights came straight from 
ancestral England. Their spontaneous aptitude for idealism, 
their enthusiastic love for abstractions and for absolute truth, 
they had derived, too, from the Elizabethan Puritans whose 
traits they had hereditarily preserved. What most surely 
marked them apart was the quality of their eager faith in 
democracy. To them this was no untested dream; it was 
rather a truth confirmed by the national inexperience of their 
still uncrowded country. Hence sprang the phase of their 
democratic temper which still seems most precious and most 
pregnant. 

The spirit of European democracy has been dominated by 
blind devotion to an enforced equality. In many American 
utterances you may doubtless find thoughtless assertion of the 
same dogma. Yet if you will ponder on the course of 

34 



530 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

American history, and still more if you will learn intimately 
to know those more eminent American men of letters who 
remain the living teachers of our growing country, you must 
grow to feel that American democracy has a wiser temper, 
still its own. The national ideal of America has never yet 
denied or even repressed the countless variety of human 
worth and power. It has urged only that men should enjoy 
liberty within the range of law. It has resisted both hngering 
and innovating tyranny ; but all the while it has kept faithful 
to the principle that, so far as public safety may permit, each 
of us has an inalienable right to strive for excellence. In the 
presence of approved excellence it has remained humble. 

The history of such future as we can now discern must be 
that of a growing world-democracy. The most threatening 
future danger, then, is often held to lurk in those dogged sys- 
tems of authority which still strive to strangle humane aspira- 
tion. No doubt these are dangerous, yet sometimes there 
must seem even deeper danger in that crescent phase of 
democracy itself which hates and condemns excellence. If 
in the conflicts to come, democracy shall overpower excellence, 
or if excellence, seeking refuge in freshly imperious assertion 
of ^authority, shall prove democracy another futile dream, the 
ways before us are dark. The more one dreads such dark- 
ness, the more gleams of counsel and help one may find in the 
simple, hopeful literature of inexperienced, renascent New 
England. There, for a while, the warring ideals of democracy 
and of excellence were once reconciled, dwelling confidently 
together in some earthly semblance of peace. 



AUTHORITIES AND REFERENCES 



AUTHORITIES AND REFERENCES 

The following memoranda indicate, first, the chief general authorities 
on the whole matter in hand ; secondly, the principal accessible 
authorities on the special topics discussed in the successive books and 
chapters ; and thirdly, the most authoritative and available editions of 
the principal works mentioned in the text. For convenience, they 
are arranged under the following heads : I. General Authorities ; 
II. Special Authorities for each book and for each chapter. 

Without pretending to be exhaustive, these memoranda should serve 
as guides to those who desire further to investigate the matter touched 
on. In general, they call attention to accessible bibliographies. . 

I. GENERAL AUTHORITIES 

1. For English History, so far as it concerns us, any standard 
authority should serve ; for example, the Encyckpadia Britannica. 

2. For English Literature, in general, the best books seem — 
Stopford Brooke: Primer of English Literature, 1889. 
Henry Craik : English Prose, etc., 5 vols., 1893-96. 
Frederick Ryland : Chronological Outlines of English Literature, 

1896. 
Thomas H. Ward : English Poets, 4 vols., 1896-1900. 

3. For American History, the following works should serve as 
general guides : — 

Edward Channing : A Students'* History of the United States, New 

York, 1899. 
Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart : Guide to the 

Study of American History, Boston, 1896. 
Justin Winsor [editor] : Narrative and Critical History of America, 

8 vols., Boston, 1886-89. 

4. For literature in America, among nimicrous works, the follow- 
ing seem perhaps the most useful : — 



534 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

a. Histories of Literature : — 

J. NicHOL : American Literature y Edinburgh, 1882. 

H. S. Pancoast : Introduction to American Literature, New York, 

1898. 
C. F. Richardson: American Literature, 2 vols.. New York, 1887. 
E. C. Stedman : Poets of America, Boston, 1885. 
M. C. Tyler : A History of American Literature during the Colonial 

Time, 2 vols.. New York, 1897. [Vol. I., 1607-76; Vol. II., 

1676-1765.] 
M. C. Tyler : The Literary History of the American Revolution, 2 

vols.. New York, 1897. 
Barrett Wendell: Stelligeri, etc.. New York, 1893. 
Greenough White : Sketch of the Philosophy of American Literature, 

Boston, 1 89 1. 

b. Collections of Extracts : — 

G. R. Carpenter: American Prose, New York, 1898. 

E. A. and G. L. Duyckinck : Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 

2 vols., Philadelphia, 1875. 
R. W. Griswold : The Poets and Poetry of America, Philadelphia, 

1842. 
R. W, Griswold : Prose Writers of America, Philadelphia, 1 847. 
R. W. Griswold : Female Poets of America, Philadelphia, 1 848. 
E. C. Stedman : An American Anthology, Boston, 1900. 
E. C. Stedman and Ellen M. Hutchinson : Library of American 

Literature, 1 1 vols.. New York, 1888-90. 

e. Bibliography and Chronology : — 
P. K. Foley : American Authors I'jg^-lBg^, etc., Boston, Privately 

Printed, 1897. 
S. L. Whitcomb : Chronological Outlines of American Literature, 

New York, 1 894. 

II. SPECIAL AUTHORITIES 

Introduction 

For a more complete statement of the theory of literary evo- 
lution, sec B. Wendell: William Shakspere, New York, 1894, 
pp. 401 ff. 



AUTHORITIES AND REFERENCES 535 



BOOK I. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
English History from 1600 to 1700 

Book I. Chapter I. 

See third paragraph of the bibliography at the end of John Fiske's 
Beginnings of New England, Boston, 1889. The great books on 
this period are, of course, S. R. Gardiner's History of England 
from the Accession of James I. to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 
1 603-1 642, 10 vols., London, 1883-84, and his History of the 
Great Civil War, 1 642-1 64Q, 3 vols., London, 1886-91. David 
Masson's Life of John Milton: with the Political, Ecclesiastical, 
and Literary History of his Time [1608- 1674], ^ vols., London, 
1859—80, is a w^ork of great learning. 

English Literature from 1600 to 1700 
Book I. Chapter II. 

In addition to the general authorities may be mentioned George 
Saintsbury's a History of Elizabethan Literature, London, 1887, 
and A. W. Ward's A History of English Dramatic Literature to the 
Death of Queen Anne, 3 vols., London, 1 899. 

American History from 1600 to 1700 

Book I. Chapter III. 

Of the books mentioned in the text, the best editions are : — 
William Bradford : History of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Charles 
Deane, Boston, 1856. Reprinted from the Mass. Hist. Soc. Col- 
lections. There is also a serviceable edition of the text, w^ith some 
interesting matter concerning the return of the Bradford MS., pub- 
lished by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Boston, 1898. 
Samuel Sewall's Diary (1674— 1729), 3 vols., Boston, 1878—82. 

[Mass. Hist. Soc. Collections, 5th series. Vols. V.-VIL] 
John Winthrop : History of New England, ed. James Savage, 2 vols., 
Boston, 1853. The best biography of Winthrop is the Life and 
Letters of John Winthrop, ed. Robert C. Winthrop, Boston, 1 864 
(copyrighted 1863). 



536 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

Literature in America from 1600 to 1700 
Book I. Chapter IV. 

For the literary history of America in the seventeenth century 
Tyler's first two volumes are almost sufficient. One may note also 
J06IAH Quincy's History of Harvard University, 2 vols., Cambridge, 
1840, and J. L, Sibley's Harvard Graduates, 3 vols., Cambridge, 
1873-85. 

A literal reprint of the first edition of the Bay Psalm Book was 
made at Cambridge in 1862, under the direction of Dr. N. B. 
BayFsalm Shurtleff. See Tyler: History of American Literature 
*"° during the Colonial Time, etc.. Vol. I. pp. 274—277 ; Win- 

soR : Memorial History of Boston, Vol. I. pp. 458—60; Wilberforce 
Eames : A List of Editions of the "Bay Psalm Book," etc.. New 
York, 1885. Stedman and Hutchinson's Library, Vol. I. pp. 211 
ff., contains extracts. 

The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse, edited by John 
Harvard Ellis, were published at Charlestown in 1867. There is 
Mrs. Brad- ^^^° ^ handsome edition entitled The Poems of Mrs. Anne 
street. Bradstreet (1612-1672), with an introduction by Prof. 

C. E. Norton [privately printed], 1897. 

J. _ On the New England Primer, see Paul Leicester Ford's 

Primer. y^^ j^g^y England Primer ; History of its Origin and De- 
velopment, etc.. New York, 1897. 

Ovid* s Metamorphosis englished by G. S. [George 
Sandys] appeared at London, in folio, 1626. [Br. Mus. 
Catalogue.] 

On the works of John Smith see Winsor's America, Vol. IIL 

Chap. V. ; also the "Note on Smith's Publications," ibid.. 
Smith. ~ . , . 

pp. 21 1— 21 2. The most accessible edition of Smith's writ- 
ings is that by Arbcr in the " English Scholar's Library," Birmingham, 
1884. 

Of Wigglesworth there is nothing in print. Professor Tyler says 
(Vol. TL p. 34) : " The eighteen hundred copies of the first edition [of 
Wi?ffles- ^^^ ^^y ?/" Doom~\ were sold within a single year ; which 
worth. implies the purchase of a copy ... by at least every thirty- 
fifth person then in New England, — an example of the commercial 
success of a book never afterward equalled in this country. Since that 



AUTHORITIES AND REFERENCES 537 

time, the book has been repeatedly published, at least once in England, 
and at least eight times in America — the last time being in 1867." 
This edition of 1867 was published at New York and contained a 
memoir by J. W. Dean, The chief biography of Wigglesworth, 
John Ward Dean's Memoir of the Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, 
Author of the Day of Doom, Albany, 1863, contains (pp. 1 40-1 51) 
a note on *♦ Editions of Wigglesworth' s Poems." 

Cotton Mather 
Book I. Chapter V, 

The life and works of Cotton Mather are adequately discussed in 
the Rev. Abijah Perkins Marvin's The Life and Times of Cotton 
Mather, Boston [1892], and in Barrett Wendell's cotton 
Cotton Mather, the Puritan Priest, New York [1891]. Mather. 
Professor Wendell's book has a list of authorities on pages 309 and 
310; Sibley's Harvard Graduates, Vol, III. pp. 42—158, has an 
elaborate Mather bibliography. The Magnalia has twice been re- 
printed in America: once in 1820 at Hartford, Conn., in 2 vols., 
8vo, and again in the same form and at the same place in 1853. 
There is now no accessible edition. 



BOOK II. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

English History from 1700 to 1800 
Book II. Chapter I. 

The great book on English history in the eighteenth century is 
W. E. H, Lecky's a History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 
8 vols., 1878-90. Lord Mahon's History of England from the 
Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles, I'/lj-iySj, 7 vols., 
1853—54, is also valuable. 

English Literature from 1700 to 1800 

Book II. Chapter II. 

For the outlines of English literary history in the eighteenth century 
the following will serve tolerably well : Alexandre Beljame : Le 
Public et les Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au Dix-huitieme Siecle 
{i 660-1 "J 44), Paris, 1 88 1; Edmund Gosse : A History of Eigh' 



538 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

teenth Century Literature, London, 1889; Thomas S. Perry: 
English Literature in the Eighteenth Century, New York, 1883. 

American History from 1700 to 1800 
Book II. Chapter III. 

For American history in the eighteenth century, the general authori- 
ties — Channing, Channing and Hart's Guide, and Winsor — will 
amply suffice. For religious matters, see G. L. Walker's Some 
Aspects of the Religious History of New England, with Special Refer- 
ence to Congregationalists, Boston, 1897. 

Literature in America from 1700 to 1776 

Book II. Chapter IV, 

On the literary history of America in the eighteenth century the 
standard authority is Professor Tyler, the second, third, and fourth 
volumes of whose work admirably cover the period from the beginning 
of the century through the year 1783. 

John Woolman's Journal, with an introduction by John G. Whit- 
tier, was published at Boston in 1871. On Woolman's life and 
writings, see Tyler's Literary History of the American Revolution, 
Chap. XXXVIL 

Of Thomas Hutchinson's History of the Colony of Massachusets- 
Bay (Vol. L Boston, 1764; Vol. IL Boston, 1767; Vol. IIL Lon- 
don, 1828), the first two volumes have been out of print 
Hutchinson. ^ 1 1 i- • , . , , ,. , , 

tor over a century, the last edition having been published 

at Salem and Boston in 1795 ; the third volume is to be found only in 
the London edition of 1828. For biographical detail, see The Diary 
and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq., ed. P. O. 
Hutchinson, 2 vols., Boston, 1884-86. The late Charles Deane 
compiled a Hutchinson bibliography which was privately printed at 
Boston in 1857. 

Jonathan Edwards 

Book II. Chapter V. 

Professor Allen writes: **The first edition of Edwards' works 
was published in Worcester, Mass., in 8 vols., i 809 ; afterwards re- 
published in 4 vols. It is still in print, the plates being owned, it is 
said, by Carter Bros., New York. Dr. Dwight's edition was pub- 
lished in New York in 1829, in 10 vols,, the first volume being 



AUTHORITIES AND REFERENCES 539 

occupied with the life. There is a London edition in 8 vols, by 
Williams, 1817 ; vols. 9 and 10 supplementary by Ogle, Edinburgh, 
1847. Another London edition in 2 vols., bearing the imprint of 
Bohn, is still in print, and though cumbrous in form is in many 
respects excellent. It possesses the only portrait of Edwards which 
answers to one's idea of the man." The best biography of Edwards 
is Prof, A. V. G. Allen's Jonathan Edwards, Boston, 1889; it 
contains (pp. 391—393) a good bibliography. One should also note 
the essays on Edwards by Holmes (Works, Riverside ed.. Vol. 
VIII. pp. 361—401) and by Leslie Stephen (^Hours in a Library, 
zd series. Chap. II., London, 1876). 

Benjamin Franklin 
Book II. Chapter VI. 

Of Franklin's works the best edition is that by John Bigelow, 10 
vols.. New York, 1887—88. Of Franklin's own Life the best edition 
is that by John Bigelow, in 3 vols., Philadelphia, 1875. The best 
biographies of Franklin seem those of Prof. John Bach McMaster, 
in the series of American Men of Letters, Boston, 1887, and of 
John T. Morse, Jr., in the American Statesmen series, Boston, 
1889. Paul Leicester Ford has compiled a Franklin Bibliography, 
Brooklyn, 1889. 

The American Revolution 
Book II. Chapter VII. 

On the literary aspect of the American Revolution, Professor 
Tyler's volumes are the best authority; for its history, John Fiske's 
American Revolution, 2 vols., Boston, 1892, is entertaining and sug- 
gestive, while Winsor's Reader's Handbook of the American Revolu- 
tion {ijdl-iySj), Boston, 1880, points the way to the authorities 
for study in detail. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell's Hugh Wynne is so 
accurate and vivid a fiction as to have the value of an authority. 

The writings of James Otis have never been collected. For notes 
on his various speeches and articles, see Winsor's Reader'' s Handbook, 
pp. 1-2, and his America, Vol. VI. pp. 68-70. Biographies 
of Otis have been written by WiUiam Tudor, Boston, 1823, 
and by Francis Bowen in Sparks's Library of American Biography, 2d 
series. Vol. II,, Boston, 1847. 



540 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

Westchester ^" ^^ "Westchester Farmer," see Winsor's Americay 
Fanner. Vol. VI. p. 104. 

The Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings of Francis Hop- 
hinson, in 3 vols, were published at Philadelphia in 1792. 
Hopsinson. q^ Hopkinson' s life and writings, see Tyler : Literary 
History of the American Revolutiony Chap. XXX. 

Literature in America from 1776 to 1800 
Book II. Chapter VIII. 

On the general conditions of life in America between the close of 
the Revolution and the beginning of the nineteenth century, see 
Henry Adams's History of the United States, 9 vols.. New York, 
1889-91. 

On the Federalist group, the chief authorities are The Federalist, 
etc., ed. Paul Leicester Ford, New York, 1898 ; The Works of 
Alexander Hamilton, ed. Henry Cabot Lodge, o vols.. 
New York, 1885-86; Madison's Papers, . . . being his 
Correspondence and Reports of Debates, ed. Henry D. Gilpin, 3 
vols., Washington, 1840, and his Letters and Other Writings, ^\o\s., 
Philadelphia, 1865; The Correspondence and Public Papers of John 
Jay, ed. Henry P. Johnston, 4 vols.. New York, 1890. For bio- 
graphical detail, see Henry Cabot Lodge's Alexander Hamilton, Bos- 
ton, 1882 (American Statesmen series) ; William C. Rives's History 
of the Life and Times of James Madison, 3 vols., Boston, 1859-68 ; 
Sydney Howard Gay's James Madison, Boston, 1884 (American 
Statesmen series), and George Pellew's John Jay, Boston, 1890 
(American Statesmen series). Copious bibliographic detail will be 
found in Winsor's America, Vol. VIL pp. 259-260, and in Paul 
Leicester Ford's Bibliotheca Hamiltoniana, New York, printed for 
the author, 1886. 

A sufficient notion of Crevecceur may be got from Tyler : Liter- 
ary History of the American Revolution, Vol. IL pp. 347—358} and 
Stedman and Hutchinson's Zz/^r^ry, Vol. IIL pp. 138—146. 
Crevecceur' s Letters from an American Farmer were pub- 
lished at London in 1782 ; there is a French translation in two vol- 
umes, published at Paris in 1784. 

Selections from the writings of the *♦ Hartford Wits" are given in 
the third volume of Stedman and Hutchinson's Library ; while Pro- 



AUTHORITIES AND REFERENCES 541 

fessor Tyler's Literary History of the American Revolution Hartford 

discusses their work at some length. For an interesting ^"^* 

monograph on the Hartford Wits, see F. Sheldon : The Pleiades of 

Connecticut, Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XV, p. 187 (Feb., 1865). 

Timothy Dwight's works are not in print. Original editions of 

importance are : The Triumph of Infidelity : A Poem. Printed in the 

World, 1788 ; The Conquest of Canaan: A Poem, in 

Dwight. 
Eleven Books, Hartford, 1785; Greenfield Hill : A Poem, 

in Seven Parts, New York, 1794; Travels in New England and New 

York {iyg6-i8l_5), 4 vols.. New Haven, 1821-22. For further 

details, see Professor Tyler's excellent Three Men of Letters [Berkeley, 

Dwight, Barlow], New York, 1895, pp. 184-185. 

The Poetical Works of Jonathan Trumbull, LL.D., were published 
at Hartford in 1820. Notable editions of M^ Fingal are the first, 
M'Fingal: a Modern Epic Poem, in Four Cantos, Hart- 
ford, 1782, i6mo ; the sixth, London, 1793, with explana- 
tory notes by Joel Barlow ; and an edition with introduction and notes 
by B. J. Lossing, New York, 1880. 

Of Joel Barlow's writings no edition is in print. For 
bibliography and other details, see Tyler's Three Men of 
Letters, pp. 131-183. 

The writings of Freneau are no longer in print. Among early 
editions should be noted Miscellaneous Works of Mr. Philip Freneau, 
Containing his Essays and Additional Poems, Philadelphia, 
1788; Poems Written between the Tears iy68 and lyg^, 
Monmouth, 1795 ; Poems Written and Published during the Amer- 
ican Revolutionary War . . . and Other Pieces not heretofore in 
Print, 2 vols., Philadelphia, 1809. On Campbell's borrowings from 
Freneau, see Tyler : Literary History of the American Revolution, 
Vol. I. pp. 177 ff. 



BOOK III. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

English History since 1800 
Book III. Chapter I. 

For English history in the nineteenth century, the general refer- 
ence will suffice. 



542 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 
English Literature since 1800 

Book III. Chapter II. 

The revolutionary temper of early nineteenth-century literature in 
England has nowhere been better defined than in Dr. A. E. Han- 
cock's The French Revolution and the English Poets, New York, 
1899. 

American History since 1800 
Book III. Chapter III. 

Abundant references for the study of American history since 1 800 
will be found in Channing and Hart's Guide, pp. 329 if. For the 
first twenty years of the century, see Henry Adams's History of the 
United States, New York^ 1889—91 ; for the period between 1850 
and 1863, J. F. Rhodes's History of the United States, New York, 
1893-99, is the chief authority. 

Literature in America since 1800 
Book III. Chapter IV. 

For literature in America since 1 800, see the general authorities. 

BOOK IV. LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE STATES 
FROM 1798 TO 1857 

Charles Brockden Brown 
Book IV. Chapter I. 

Brockden Brown's novels have been published at Philadelphia, 
6 vols., 1857, and in a later and more sumptuous edition, 6 vols., 
Philadelphia, 1887, limited to 500 copies. Notable biographies of 
Brown are William Dunlap's Life, 2 vols., Philadelphia, 181 5, and 
William H. Prescott's in Sparks's Library of American Biography, 
Vol. I. pp. 119— 180, or in Prescott's Biographical and Critical 
Miscellanies, New York, 1845. 

Washington Irving 
Book IV. Chapter II. 

Irving' s works are published, in various editions, by the Futnams 
of New York. Standard biographies are the Life and Letters of Wash- 



AUTHORITIES AND REFERENCES 543 

ington Irving, by his nephew, Pierre M, Irving, 4 vols.. New York, 
1862-64, and Mr. Charles Dudley Warner's Washington Irving, 
Boston, 1 881, in the American Men of Letters series. 



James Fenimore Cooper 
Book IV. Chapter III. 

Editions of Cooper' s novels abound ; his other works are not in 
print. The best life of Cooper is that by Prof. T. R. Lounsbury, 
Boston, 1883, in the American Men of Letters series. It has a con- 
siderable bibliography. An excellent monograph on Cooper, by 
W. B. S. Clymer, has since been published in the Beacon Biography 
series at Boston. 

William Cullen Bryant 

Book IV. Chapter IV. 

Of Bryant's works the standard edition is that of Parke Godwin: 
Poetical Works, 2 vols.. New York, 1883 ; Prose Writings, 2 vols.. 
New York, 1884. The best life of Bryant is Parke Godwin's, in 
two volumes. New York, 1883. 

Griswold's collections and Duyckinck's Cyclopaedia have already 
been referred to in the list of general references. Drake and Halleck 
are generously represented in Stedman and Hutchinson's Library and 
in the collections of Griswold. 

Edgar Allan PoE 
Book IV. Chapter V. 

Stedman and Woodberry's edition of Poe, in 10 vols., Chicago, 
1 894-95, is admirable. The best biography of Poe is Professor Wood- 
berry's, Boston, 1885, in the American Men of Letters series. For 
Poe bibliography, see Stedman and Woodberry's tenth volume, pp. 
267-281. 

The Knickerbocker School 

Book IV. Chapter VI. 

On American periodical publication between 18 15 and 1833, see 
Dr. W. B. Cairns : On the Development of American Literature 



544 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

from i8ij; to i8jji with Especial Reference to Periodicals, Madison, 
Wisconsin, 1898. 

For the Knickerbocker writers in general, one should glance, if 
possible, at The Knickerbocker Gallery : a Testimonial to the Editor 
of the Knickerbocker Magazine from its Contributors. . . . New 
York: Samuel Hueston, MDCCCLV. 

On Willis, Professor Beers writes : ♦* Of the various collective 

editions of his [Willis's] verse, published since 1 844, . . . the final 

and most complete is . . . the Clark and Mavnard edition 
Willis. 

of 1868. No really complete edition of Willis's writings 

has ever been printed. The first collective edition which laid claim 
to being complete was entitled The Complete Works of N. P. Willis, 
I vol., 895 pp.. New York, J. S. Redfield, 1846. The thirteen 
volumes in uniform style, issued by Charles Scribner from 1849 to 
1859, form as nearly a complete edition of Willis's prose as is ever 
likely to be made." (Beers' s Willis, p. 353-) A volume of selec- 
tions from Willis's prose writings appeared at New York in 1885, 
under the editorship of Prof. H. A. Beers. The best biography of 
Willis is that by Professor Beers, Boston, 1885, in the American 
Men of Letters series. 

Mrs. Kirkland's books, originally published by Francis, of New 
York and Boston, seem to be no longer in print ; they are chiefly 
A New Hofne : Who Ul Follow ? 1839; Forest Life, 1 842 ; Western 
Clearings, 1846. 

Hermann Melville's best-known stories are: Tj/i?^, 1846 ; 
Omoo, 1847 ; Moby Dick, the White Whale, 1851. 

Standard biographies of Bayard Taylor are his Life and Letters, 

edited by Marie Hansen-Taylor and Horace E. Scudder, 
Taylor. 

2 vols., Boston, 1884, and Albert H. Smyth's Bayard 

Taylor, Boston, i 896, in the American Men of Letters series. 

The principal writings of George William Curtis, with their dates 

of publication, are: Nile Notes of a Howadji, 1851; Lotus Eating: 

A Summer Book, 1 8 c 2 ; The Potiphar Papers, 1853; 
Curtis. 

Prue and I, 1856; Works; Collected and Newly Re- 
vised by the Author, 5 vols., 1856; Essays from the Easy Chair, 
three series, 1892— '93— '94. Mr. Edward Cary has written a life 
of Curtis for the American Men of Letters series, Boston, 1894. 



AUTHORITIES AND REFERENCES 545 



BOOK V. THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND 

Some General Characteristics of New England 

Book V. Chapter 1. 

The outlines of New England history in the colonial period are 
well depicted in John Fiske's The Beginnings of New England, Bos- 
ton, 1889, which has a good bibliography, and in Brooks Adams's 
The Emancipation of Massachusetts, ^o^lon, 1887. Winsor's ^w^r- 
ica. Vol. III., and Channing and Hart's Guide, § 109 fF., con- 
tain extensive bibliographic notes on New England colonial history. 

Of the later records of New England life mentioned in the text, 
Mrs. Stowe's Oldtown Folks, originally published at Boston in 1869, 
where also her Uncle Tom'' s Cabin appeared in two volumes in 1852, 
may be found in the lately published Riverside edition of her works ; 
Whittier's Snow Bound, first printed at Boston in 1866, is promi- 
nent in any edition of his poems j Lowell's Cambridge Thirty Tears 
Ago (1854) is in the first volume of the Riverside edition of his 
works, and his A Great Public Character (1867) is in the second 
volume of the same edition ; Miss Larcom's chief works, with the 
dates of publication, are : Ships in the Mist and Other Stories, 1859 ; 
Poems, 1868; Childhood Songs, 1874; An Idyl of Work, 1875; 
Wild Roses of Cape Ann, and Other Poems, 1881 ; A New England 
Girlhood, 1889; Miss Jewett's principal works up to 1895 maybe 
found in Foley's American Authors, pp. 158-9; since 1895 she has 
published The Country of the Pointed Firs, 1896, and The Queen'' s 
Twin, and Other Stories, 1900 ; Dr. Edward Everett Hale's New 
England Boyhood, first published at Boston in 1893, may be found in 
the sixth volume of his lately collected works, Boston, 1900; Miss 
Wilkins has written The Adventures of Ann, 1886; A Humble Ro- 
mance and Other Stories, 1887; A New England Nun and Other 
Stories, 1891 ; Young Lucretia and Other Stories, 1892 ; The Pot 
of Gold and Other Stories [1892]; Jane Field. A Novel, 1893 ; 
Giles Cory, Yeoman. A Play, 1893; Pembroke: A Novel, 1894; 
Madelon. A Novel, 1 896 ; Jerome, A Poor Man. A Novel, 1 897 ; 
Miss Alcott's Little Women was published at Boston, 1868-69. 
On the literary history of New England, see W. C. Lawton's New 
England Poets, New York, 1898. 

35 



546 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 
The New England Orators 

Book V. Chapter II. 

Webster's Works, in 6 vols., were published at Boston in 1851 j 

for select speeches, see E. P. Whipple's The Great Speeches and 

Orations of Daniel Webster, with an Essay on Daniel 
Webster. 

Webster as a Master of English Style, Boston, 1879. 

Good biographies of Webster are George Ticknor Curtis' s Life of 
Daniel Webster, 2 vols.. New York, 1870, and Henry Cabot 
Lodge's Daniel Webster, Boston, 1883. 

Edward Everett's Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions, in 
4 vols., were published in Boston, 1853-68. On the renascent in- 
fluence of Everett's teaching, one should read Emerson's 
Everett. 

"Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," 

Works, Riverside edition. Vol. X. pp. 307 ff. 

RuFus Choate's Works, with Memoir by S. G. Brown, 

were published in Boston,- 1802. 

Robert Charles Winthrop's Addresses and Speeches on Various 

Occasions were published, in 4 vols., Boston, 1852—86. 

The standard life of Winthrop is the Memoir by his son, 

Robert C. Winthrop, Jr., Boston, 1897. 

The New England Scholars and Historians 

Book V. Chapter III. 

For an article on " Libraries in Boston " by the late Justin Winsor, 
see his Memorial History of Boston, Vol. IV. pp. 235 fF. 

Prince's Chronological History of New England may be 
conveniently found in Arber's English Garner, Vol. IL 
pp. 287 fF., London, 1879. 

George Ticknor' s History of Spanish Literature was published 

in three volumes at New York, 1849; his Life of William Hickling 

Prescott appeared at Boston in 1864. The best biography 

of Ticknor is The Life, Letters, and Journals of George 

Ticknor, by Miss Anna Ticknor, 2 vols., Boston, 1876. 

Sparks' s historical labours may be suggested by these chief titles: 

Library of American Biography, first series, 10 vols., Boston, 1834— 

38; 2d series, 1 5 vols., Boston, 1844-48; Washington's 

Writings, 12 vols., Boston, 1834—37; Franklin's Works, 

10 vols., Boston, 1836-40; Correspondence of the American Revt- 



AUTHORITIES AND REFERENCES 547 

lution, 4 vols., Boston, 1853; The Diplomatic Correspondence of 

the American Revolution, 12 vols., Boston, 1829-30. For further 

detail, both biographical and bibliographical, see Herbert B. Adams's 

The Life and Writings of Jared Sparks, 2 vols., Boston, 1893. 

Sparks's MSS. may be seen in the reading room of Harvard College 

Library. 

Prescott's History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the 

Catholic, 3 vols. , appeared at Boston in 1838; his History of the 

Conquest of Mexico, etc., in 3 vols., at New York in 1 84^ : 

Ffcscott. 

his Biographical and Critical Miscellanies, at New York in 

1845 ; the History of the Conquest of Peru, etc., 2 vols.. New York, 
1 847 ; and the History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of 
Spain, 3 vols., Boston, 1855-58. The best biography of Prescott is 
George Ticknor's Life of William Hickling Prescott, Boston, 1864. 

Motley's Merry- Mount ; A Romance of the Massachusetts Colony, 
2 vols., appeared at Boston and Cambridge, in 1849 ; The Rise of the 
Dutch Republic. A History, 3 vols.. New York, 1856; 
History of the United Netherlands, etc., 4 vols.. New 
York, 1861-68; The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, etc., 
2 vols.. New York, 1875. Motley's letters have been edited by 
George William Curtis, in 2 vols.. New York, 1889. See also the 
Memoir by Dr. Holmes, Boston, 1879. 

George Bancroft's A History of the United States, etc., in 10 

vols., was published at Boston and London, 1834—74; 

"The Author's Last Revision," in 6 vols., was published 

at New York, 1883-85. 

Richard Hildreth's The History of the United States of 

•^ -^ ;, Hildretli. 

America was published, in 6 vols., at New York, 1851—56. 

Palfrey's History of New England, in 5 vols., Boston, 
1858-90. Palfrey died in 1881 ; the fifth volume was 
edited by his son, F. W. Palfrey. 

Francis Parkman's works, of which he personally retained the 

copyright, are published, in various editions, by Little, Brown & Co., 

of Boston. For accounts of Parkman's life and estimates 

Farkmaa. 
of his work, see John Fiske s A Century of Science and 

Other Essays, Boston, 1 899 ; and Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings for 

1893, 2d series. Vol. VIIL pp. 349—369. The authorized biography 

of Parkman, by C. H. Farnham, has just been published in Boston. 



548 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

Unitarianism 
Book V. Chapter IV. 

On Unitarianism in general, see the article by Dr. Andrew P. 
Peabody in Winsor's Memorial History of Boston^ Vol. III. 
Chap. XI. 

Channing's works may be found in a convenient one-volume edition 
published at Boston in 1886. For his life, see William H. Chan- 
ning's Memoirs of William Ellery Channing, 3 vols., Boston, 1848, 
also published in one volume called the " Century Memorial Edi- 
tion," at Boston in 1880, 

The biography of George Ripley has been written by O. B. Froth- 
ingham for the series of American Men of Letters, Boston, 1882. 

Transcendentalism 
Book V. Chapter V. 

On Transcendentalism in general one should consult O. B. Froth- 
Transcen- ingham's Transcetidentalism in New England : A History y 
dentalism. ^ew York, 1876; and, if possible. The Dial: A Maga- 
zine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion, 4 vols., Boston, 
I 840-44. 

The life of Margaret Fuller Ossoli has been written by Col. 
Margaret Thomas Wentworth Higginson for the series of American 
FuUer. y^^^ ^f Letters, Boston, 1884. 

Of several books on Brook Farm, the best is Mr. Lindsay Swift's 

Brook Farm: Its Members, Scholars, and Visitors, New 
Brook Farm. -r , 

York, 1900. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson 
Book V. Chapter VI. 

The standard edition of Emerson' s works is the Riverside, in 1 2 
vols. See also the two volumes of Carlyle-Emerson letters, edited 
by Prof. Charles Eliot Norton. The standard biography of Emer- 
son is the Memoir, in two volumes, by James Elliot Cabot, Boston, 
1887. Holmes's Ralph Waldo Emerson, Boston, 1884, in the Ameri- 
can Men of Letters series, is valuable; Garnett's Life of Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, London, 1888, in the Great Writers scries, has a considerable 



AUTHORITIES AND REFERENCES 549 

bibliography. Important critical estimates of Emerson are Matthew 
Arnold's Emerson^ in his Discourses in America; 'La^N^^'s, Emerson 
the Lecturer, in his Works, Riverside edition. Vol. I. pp. 349 fF. ; 
and John Jay Chapman's Emerson, Sixty Tears After, originally 
published in the Atlantic Monthly for January and February, 1897, 
and since reprinted in Emerson and Other Essays, New York, 1898. 

The Lesser Men of Concord 
Book V. Chapter VII. 

Bronson Alcott's chief works, with their dates of publication, are : 
Observations on the Principles and Methods of Infant Instruction, 
1830; The Doctrine and Discipline of Human Culture, 1836; Con- 
versations with Children on the Gospels, 2 vols., 1836-37; Tablets, 
1868; Coticord Days, 1872; Table Talk, 1877; New Connecticut. 
An AutobiographicaT Poem, 1881; Sonnets and Canzonets, 1882; 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, . . . An Estimate of his Character and Genius, 
etc., 1882. There is a Memoir of Alcott, in 2 vols., by Messrs. 
F. B. Sanborn and William T, Harris, Boston, 1893. 

The standard collection of Thoreau's works is the Riverside edi- 
tion, in 10 vols., published at Boston. With Mr. F. B. Sanborn's 
Henry David Thoreau, Boston, 1882, and Emerson's 
Thoreau, in the Riverside edition of his works, Vol. X. 
pp. 421—452, compare Lowell's Thoreau, in his Works, Riverside 
edition. Vol. I. pp. 361 ff. See also Stevenson's essay on Thoreau, 
in his Familiar Studies in Men and Books (Works, Thistle edition. 
Vol. XIV. pp. 116-149). Mr. H. S. Salt's Z//^ of Thoreau, 
London, 1 896, contains a bibliography. 

Theodore Parker's collected works, in 14 vols., were published at 
London, 1863—65; his Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons 
were published in 2 vols., Boston, 1852. For the life 
of Parker, see John Weiss : Life and Correspondence of 
Theodore Parker, 2 vols.. New York, 1864, and O. B. Frothing- 
ham's Theodore Parker: a Biography, Boston, 1874. 

The Antislavery Movement 

Book V. Chapter VIII. 

On the Abolition movement in general, see Winsor's Memorial 
History of Boston, Vol. III. Chap. VI., and Col. Thomas Wentworth 



5 so LITER ARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

Higginson's Contemporaries, Boston, 1899 ; for bibliographic notes on 

the subject, consult Channing and Hart's Guide, § 187 fF. 

Selections from Writings and Speeches of William Lloyd Garrison 

were published at Boston, in 1852. The best biography of 

Garrison is that by Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis 

Jackson Garrison, 4 vols.. New York, 1885—89. 

Charles Sumner's works, in 1 5 vols., were published at Boston 

in 1874—83. The most complete biography is Edward L, Pierce's 

Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 4 vols., Boston, 

1879—93 ; a shorter book is Mr. Moorfield Storey's 

Charles Sumtier, Boston, 1900, in the American Statesmen series. 

On the Sumner-Brooks affair, see J. F. Rhodes' s History of the United 

States, Vol. II. Chap. VII. 

The standard collections of Mrs. Stowe's writings is the lately 

published Riverside edition in 16 vols. Mrs. J. T. Fields has 

written The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Boston, 
Mri.Stowe. „ •' -^ 

1897. 

John Greenleaf Whittier 

Book V. Chapter IX. 

The standard collection of Whittier's writings is the Riverside 
edition in 7 vols. The best biography is Samuel T. Pickard's 
Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, 2 vols. , Boston, 1 894. 
William J. Linton's Life of Whittier (London, 1893, in the 
Great Writers series) contains a bibliography. For a more extended 
expression of the views set forth in this chapter, see B. Wendell ; 
Stelligeri, New York, 1893, pp. 149-201. 

The "Atlantic Monthly" 
Book V. Chapter X. 

One gets an interesting impression of the general temper of the 
early "Atlantic Monthly" by glancing over The Atlantic Index, 
1837-88, pubHshed at Boston in 1889. 

The writings of James T. Fields are chiefly : Poems, 1 849 ; Yes- 
terdays with Authors, \%-]Z', Hawthorne, 1876; Old Acquaintance. 
Barry Cornwall and Some of bis Friends, 1876; In and 
Out of Doors with Charles Dickens, 18765 Underbrush, 
1877; Ballads and Other Verses, 1881. 



AUTHORITIES AND REFERENCES 551 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

Book V. Chapter XI. 

The Standard collection of Longfellow's works is the Riverside 
edition in 1 1 vols. Samuel Longfellow's Life, etc., 3 vols., Boston, 
1891, includes all the materials in the Life of 1886 and in the 
Final Memorials of 1887. Eric S. Robertson's Life of Henry 
Wadsworth Longfellow, London, 1887, in the Great Writers series, 
has a bibliography. 

James Russell Lowell 

Book V. Chapter XII. 

Lowell's works are collected in the Riverside edition, 11 vols., 
Boston. See also the Last Poems, edited by Prof. Charles Eliot 
Norton. Lowell's Letters, also edited by Professor Norton, were 
published in 2 vols., at New York, 1894. ^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^ °f 
Lowell's hfe see the memoir by A. Lawrence Lowell, in Mass. 
Hist. Soc. Proceedings, 2d series. Vol. XL pp. 75 ff., and Dr. 
Edward Everett Hale's James Russell Lowell and his Friends, Boston, 
1 899. Mr. Horace E. Scudder is preparing a biography of Lowell for 
the American Men of Letters series. For a sketch of Lowell as a 
teacher, see B. Wendell : Stelligeri, pp. 205-217. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes 
Book V. Chapter XIII. 

The standard collection of the writings of Dr. Holmes is the River- 
side edition in 14 vols. ; the best biography is that by Mr. John 
T. Morse, Jr., the Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, 2 
vols., Boston, 1896. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne 
Book V. Chapter XIV. 

Hawthorne's works are collected in the Riverside edition, 12 vols., 
Boston. Perhaps the most notable biographies are Julian Haw- 
thorne's "Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife, 2 vols., Boston, 1885, 
and Mr. Henry James's Hawthorne, London, 1879, in the English 
Men of Letters series. 



552 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 
The Decline of New England 

Book V. Chapter XV. 

E. P. Whipple published : Essays and Reviews, 2 vols., 1848—49; 

Lectures on Subjects connected with Literature and Life, 1 849 ; 

Character and Characteristic Men, 1 866 : The Literature 
Whipple. 

of the Age of Elizabeth, 1 869 ; Success and Its Conditions, 

1871 ; American Literature, and Other Papers, 1887 ; Outlooks on 

Society, Literature, and Politics, 1888. 

R. H. Dana is chiefly known for his Two Tears before the Mast, 

1840, and his To Cuba, and Back: A Fa cation Voyage, 
Dana. „ 

1859. 

The writings of Bishop Brooks are published at New York, by 
Messrs. E. P. Dutton & Co. Prof. A. V. G. Allen is said to be 
preparing an exhaustive Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, to be 
published probably in 2 vols. ; meanwhile, Mr. M. A. deW. 
Howe's Phillips Brooks, Boston, 1899, is usefial. 

The Letters and Recollections of "John Murray Forbes, edited by 
his daughter, Sarah Forbes Hughes, were published in 2 vols, at 
Boston, 1 899. 



BOOK VI. THE REST OF THE STORY 
New York since 1857 

Book VI. Chapt«r I. 

For Bayard Taylor, see p. 544. 

For a list of the writings of Richard Grant White see Foley's 

«. .... « .. American Authors, pp. 304-307 ; for the publications of 
Rich'd Grant ^ ^, ,., c 1. 1 r u 

White. Dr. Holland, tbid., pp. 127-129 ; for the work of the 

Roe. ■ Rev. E. P. Roe, ibid., pp. 241-242. The late Henry 

Bunner published : A Woman of Honor, 1883 ; Airs from 

Arcady and Elsewhere, 1884; The Midge, 1886; The Story of a 

New Tork House, 1887; Short Sixes, Stories to be Read while the 

Candle burns, 1891 ; Zadoc Pine and Other Stories, 1891 ; The 

Runaway Browns, 1892; P.owen. "Second-Crop'^ Songs, 1892 ; 

Made in France : French Tales re-told with a U. S. Twist, 1893; 

More Short Sixes, 1895. 



AUTHORITIES AND REFERENCES 553 

Walt Whitman 
Book VI. Chapter II. 

Whitman's Complete Prose Works, Boston, 1898, and his Leaves 
of Grass, Boston, 1898, together contain most of his work. Of the 
writings about Whitman one should note Whitman : A Study, by 
John Burroughs, Boston, 1 896, which forms the tenth and last volume 
of the " New Riverside edition" of Burroughs' s works; and Mr. 
John Jay Chapman's essay (pp. iii— iz8) in Emerson and Other 
Essays, New York, 1898. Much of the other writing on Whitman 
is collected in a volume called In Re Walt Whitman, edited by 
Horace L. Traubel and others, and published at Philadelphia in 
1893. 

Literature in the South 
Book VI. Chapter III. 

Prof. William P. Trent's William Gilmore Simms, Boston, 1892, 
besides being an excellent biography of its subject, is a fairly sufficient 
guide to the literature of the South. Simms's works, in 10 vols., were 
published at New York in 1882; his Poems, 2 vols., at New York 
in 1853. 

Paul H. Hayne's Poems, Complete, etc., were published in Bos- 
ton, 1882. See Sidney Lanier's Paul H. Hayne's Poetry in his 
Music and Poetry, New York, 1898, pp. 197— 211. 

The latest collection of Timrod's work, a handsome •* Memorial 
Edition " with memoir and portrait, was published at Boston in i 899. 

The chief writings of Sidney Lanier are : Poems, 1877; The 
Science of English Verse, 1880; The English Novel and 
the Principle of Its Development, 1883; Poems, edited by 
his wife, 1884; Music and Poetry, 1898 ; Retrospects and Prospects^ 
1899; Letters \\%(i(i-\%%\\, 1899. 

The West 
Book VI. Chapter IV. 

For a note on Mrs. Kirkland's wridngs, see p. 544. 

Charles Farrar Browne (**A. Ward") published: Browne 
Artemus Ward: his Book, 1 86 2; Artemus Ward: ^/j (A. Ward.) 
Travels, 1865 ; Artemus Ward in London, and Other Papers, 1867; 



554 LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA 

Complete Works, with Memoir by E. P. Hingston, London [1869] ; 
Sandwiches, 1870. The last two appeared after his death (1867). 

David Ross Locke's (Petroleum V. Nasby's) writings are chiefly : 
The Nasby Papers, etc., 1864 ; Divers Fiews, Opinions, and Prophe- 
I^ie "^^> 1866; Swingin* round the Cirkle, 1867; Ekkoes 

(Hasby). j-^g^ Kentucky, 1868; Struggles, Social, Political, and 
Financial, 1873 ; The Moral History of America's Life-Struggle, 
1874 ; The Morals of Abou Ben Adhem : Eastern Fruit on Western 
Dishes, 1875 ; Inflation at the Cross Roads, 1875 ; A Paper City, 
1879; Hannah Jane, 1881; Nasby in Exile ; or Six Months of 
Travel, 1882; The Demagogue. A Political Novel, 1891. 



AUTHORiriES AND REFERENCES 555 



NOTE 

To any one who knows the admirable books of Prof. Moses Coit 
Tyler, the obligation under which he has placed all future students of 
literature in America must be obvious. So far as his work has pro- 
ceeded, it leaves little to be done by others. The best short and 
popular book on the subject is Mr. Pancoast's. Stedman and Hutchin- 
son's "Library of American Literature" is an excellent anthology, 
supplemented by a trustworthy biographical dictionary, and exhaustively 
indexed. Mr. Stedman's ''American Anthology" has admirable 
biographic notes. 

Among those who have been helpful in the preparation of this 
book, it seems proper to mention Messrs. Philip Jacob Gentncr, 
Chester Noyes Greenough, and George Stockton Wills, of Harvard 
University. Mr. Greenough has rendered great assistance in the 
preparation of the bibliographical notes. Particular acknowledgment 
is also due to Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose constant 
interest and kindness have been equalled only by his tolerance of 
occasional difference of opinion. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



A BBOTT, Jacob, his " Rollo," 237, 

3°-> 337- 
Abbott, John S. C, 378. 
Absolute Truth, devotion to, in New 
England, 238, 240, 241, 244, 294, 

297, 299. 309. 446, 523. 524, 529- 

Abstract Principles, American De- 
votion to, 63, 109-110, 1 15-1 16, 
523, 525. See Revolution, in 
general ; Right and Rights. 

Adams, Charles Francis, 438. 

Adams, Henry, his " History of the 
United States," 117, 149. 

Adams, John, 7, 76, 117, 120, 247- 
248, 260, 437. 

Adams, John Quincy, 437. 

Adams, Samuel, 77, 120, 247, 260. 

Addison, Joseph, 40, 65, 66, 68, 69, 
95, loi, 136, 167, 248, 484, 524. 

Africans, Native, 342, 482. See 
Slavery. 

Agassiz, Louis, 376, 438. 

Ainsworth, Harrison, 211. 

Albany, New York, 451. 

Albemarle, George Monk, Duke of, 

19. 32- 
Alcott, Amos Bronson, 328-332; 302, 

303. 333. 337, 372- 
Alcott, Louisa May, her "Little 

Women," 237, 337. 
Alertness of Mind, as a national 

trait, 22, ICO. 
Almanacs in' America, 36, 79. 
America, defined, 6. See History, 

Literature, National Traits, United 

States. 
America, Literary History of, 6, 9, 

10. 521-530- 
American Academy of Arts aftd 
Sciences, 261, 262. 



" American Brag," 160, 445. 
American Philosophical Society, 79, 

93, 26r. 
Ames, Fisher, 120, 248. 
Anarchy, 478. 
Andover Theological Seminary, 192, 

282, 415 ; Phillips Academy, 224, 

348, 408. 
Andrew, John Albion, 438. 
Anne, Queen, 59, 65, 66, 67, 68, 119, 

484, 524. 
Anniversary Week in Boston, 420. 
Anthology Club in Boston, 261, 291. 
Antiquity, American delight in, 178, 

271, 432. 
Antislavery Movement, 339-357 ,* 

80, 131, 304, 305, 338, 369, 387- 

389, 401. See Reformers, Whit- 
tier. 
Appleton, Thomas Gold, 438-439. 
Aristocracy, tacit in New England, 

71-73. 76, 235, 237, 242, 352, 356. 
Armada, the Invincible, 26. 
Arnold, Matthew, 526, 528. 
Artistic Conscience of Americans, 

177, 179, 217-218, 432-434, 477, 

517, 527, 529. 
Artistic Expression in the history of 

peoples, 462. 
Artistic Temperament, 427-428, 430, 

433. 471- 
Assimilation, American power of, 28, 

70, 77, 523- 
" Atlantic Monthly," the, 370-377 ; 

229, 378, 404, 410, 417, 436, 443- 

444, 449, 453. 
Audubon, John James, 486. 
Augustine, Saint, 16, 17,89, 279, 298* 
Austen, Jane, 193. 
Australia, 104, 143. 



560 



INDEX 



"D ACON, Francis, 4, 22, 32, 37, 77. 
Baltimore, 205, 233, 267, 284, 481. 
Bancroft, George, 271-272. 
Barlow, Joel, 126-128; 123, 129, 165. 
Barnum, P. T., 511. 
Bartlet, Phebe, 87-88. 
Bartlett, Sidney, 415. 
Bay Psalm Book, 36-38. 
Beaumont and Fletcher, 22, 25, 298. 
Beecher, Henry Ward, 353. 
Beecher, Lyman, 352-353. 
Beers, Henry Augustin, his Life of 

Willis, 226. 
Bellows Falls, Vermont, 157. 
Bethlehem, the Moravians of, 72. 
Bible, the Enghsh, 5, 8, 16, 22, 30, 

38, 46, 47, 70, 82, 190, 246, 248, 283, 

292, 298, 373, 521. 
Bible, Eliot's Indian, 51. 
Bishoprics proposed in the American 

Colonies, iii. 
Blackstone's " Commentaries," 76, 

118. 
Blenheim, Battle of, 60, 61. 
" Bohemia " in America, 206, 229, 

516-517. 

Boone, Daniel, 500. 

Boston, 26, 47, 55, 71, 76, 78, 92, 94, 
95, 105, 120, 121, 122, 124, 193, 194, 
201, 204, 223-225, 229, 233-234, 
236, 237, 240-248, 253, 261-262, 
264-266, 271, 275, 281, 287, 291, 
292, 295, 297, 311, 317, 329, 351, 
352. 353. 357. 360, 365. 370. 374. 
375. 376, 389. 393. 402, 407-410, 
412, 415, 416, 418, 420, 423, 426, 
436-440, 450, 451, 453-454, 505- 

Boston Athenaeum, 261, 262, 291. 

Boston Museum, 247. 

Boston Public Library, 265-266. 

Bowdoin College, 354, 378-380, 425, 
426. 

Braddock's Defeat, 73, 74. 

Bradford, William, 26^ 32, 50. His 
" History of Plymouth Planta- 
tion," 31, 263. 

Bradstreet, Anne, 36, 40, 78, 119. 

Brattle Street Church in Boston, 
253, 288, 442. 



British Classics published in Amer- 
ica, 157. 

Brook Farm, 305-309; 304, 324, 331, 
333, 426, 429, 455. 

Brooklyn, New York, 353, 465, 472, 
478-479. 

Brooks, Phillips, Bishop of Massa- 
chusetts, 122, 287, 438, 439, 443. 

Brooks, Preston, his assault on Sum- 
ner, 351, 483. 

Brown, Charles Brockden, 157-168 ; 
169, 175, 181, 184, 185, 189, 190, 
192, 194, 203, 219, 228, 230, 269, 
280, 290, 335, 374, 432, 433, 449, 
488, 527. 

Browne, Charles Farrar, 511. 

Browne, Sir Thomas, 23. 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 147, 
209, 526, 528. 

Browning, Robert, 147,475-476, 526, 
528. 

Bryant, William Cullen, 192-203; 
204, 205, 206, 207, 219, 221, 228, 
229, 230, 244, 280, 288, 290, 338, 
360, 433, 449, 527; his Transla- 
tions from the Spanish, 391, 394. 

Bulwer-Lytton, 161, 228. 

Bunker Hill, Battle of, 76, 247, 250. 
Monument, 250, 403. 

Bunner, Henry Cuyler, 461. 

Bunyan, John, 20, 40. 

Burke, Edmund, 65, 67, 68, 69, 76, 

^^, 108, 141, 524. 

Burns, Robert, 67, 68, 119, 123, 136, 

524- 
Burton's " Anatomy of Melancholy,". 

23, 54, 400. 
Butler, Samuel, 126,400. His " Hu- 

dibras," 38, 40, 124, 125, 126. 
Byles, Mather, 442. 
Byrd, William, 484. 
Byron, Lord, 145, 146, 174, 192, 196, 

526, 527. 

(^ABOT, James Elliot, his Life 

of Emerson, 309-316, 431. 
Cairns, W. B., his monograph on 

American Literature, 219. 
Calhoun, John Caldwell, 4S5. 



INDEX 



'561 



Calvin, 14, 16, 89, 279. 

Calvinism, summarized, 15, 16; in 
New England, 28, 34-40, 74, 80, 
81,84-91, 103, 121, 122, 180, 224, 
238, 240, 241, 277, 280-283, 286, 
287, 353. 359. 372, 385, 400, 407, 
408, 409, 414, 418-423. 523. 528- 
See Puritanism. 

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 71, 381, 
393. 395> 396- Church of, 52, 288, 
407. See Harvard College. 

Campbell, Thomas, 132, 134, 196. 

Canada, 30, 62, 73, 104, 105, 142, 

143- 
Carlyle, Thomas, 147, 206, 272, 296, 

313. 475-476, 526, 528. 

Centuries, in American history, 6-7 ; 
in general: the Seventeenth, 13- 
55, 136, 522-523; the Eighteenth, 
59-136 ; 30, 357, 417, 423, 524-525 ; 
the Nineteenth, 139-154,518, 525- 
530. See History, Literature. 

" Century Magazine," the, 453, 454, 

459- 

Channing, Edward Tyrrell, 194, 262. 

Channing, William Ellery, 284-286 ; 
122, 267, 277, 279, 280, 291, 292, 
293. 294, 296, 303, 338, 341, 379, 
437. 442. 

Character, the Development of 
American National, 7, 9, 33, 34, 
74-76, 80, 102-103, 109-111, 136, 
160, 162, 169, 186, 202, 238-245, 
355. 523-530. 

Characteristics of New England, 

233-245- 
Characters, in American fiction, 165, 

184, 185-186, 1S8, 189. 354, 488. 
Charles I., 13, 26, 79, 107. 
Charles II., 13, 19, 90. 
Charleston, South Carolina, 486, 487, 

488, 491, 492. 
" Charlotte Temple," Mrs. Rowson, 

21 9. 
Charters of Massachusetts, 45. 
Chatham, William Pitt, Earl of, 77, 

loS. 
Chaucer, 4, 5. 
Chicago, 73, 233, 451, 505-507. 



36 



Choate, Rufus, 106, 257, 371, 439, 

485- 

Church of England, see Episcopal. 

Church and State in America, 70,83. 
See Theocracy. 

Churchill, Charles, 119. 

Cincinnati, 353. 

Civil War, the American, 73, 104, 
105, 151-152, 256, 351, 357, 365- 
366, 368, 378, 39S, 440, 450, 459, 
461, 463, 466, 474, 478, 480, 481, 
484, 487, 488, 489-499. 503. 5". 
513. 514- 

Civil Wars of England, 17, 18, 23, 
29, 104, 107, 112, 346, 522. 

Clark, Lewis Gaylord, 208, 220-223, 
226. 

Clarke, James Freeman, 438. 

Class of 1829 at Harvard, 408, 414. 

Classical Temper in American Writ- 
ings, 201, 315-316, 431, 432- 

Classics, study and influence of, in 
America, 247, 253-254, 257, 258- 
259, 260, 274, 292, 298, 325, 373, 

483- 

Clay, Henry, 485, 486. 

Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, 513. 

Clergy of New England, 71, 72, 75, 
83. 235. 238-240, 246, 247, 258, 260, 
281, 287, 292, 308, 311, 318, 325, 
347, 439. 441-442, 465- See Or- 
thodoxy, Puritanism, Theocracy, 
Unitarianism. 

Cleveland, Ohio, 511, 512. 

Coats of Arms, in New England, 71, 

243- 
Coleman, Benjamin, 442. 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 67, 69, 

145, 146, 193, 296, 526, 527. 
Columbia College, 79, 461, 480. 
Commerce of New England, 244, 

425, 440. 
Common-sense in American Men of 

Letters, 98-101, 324-325, 328, 471, 

527. 
Commonwealth, the English, 13, 20, 

21, 29, 42, 483, 523. See Cromwell. 
Concord, Massachusetts, 328-338 ; 

76, 315. 317. 403. 426, 429. 



562 



INDEX 



Congregations in New England, 
239-240, 246. 

Connecticut, 78, 83, no, 123, 126, 
329. 332, 352, 353. 407- See Hart- 
ford, New Haven. 

Conservatism in America, 527 ; in 
New England, 243, 259, 302, 326- 

327, 343-346, 35°' 356. 371, 442; 
in the South, 482-483, 487 ; in 
England, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 68, 

139-141- 
Constitution, the English, 16, 18, 19, 

33, 140-141. See Reform Bill. 
Constitution of the United States, 6, 

29. 76, 93. "8, 149, 345, 346, 359, 

366, 502. 
Cooke, John Esten, 486, 487. 
Cooper, James Fenimore, 181-191 ; 

176, 194, 203, 207, 228, 230, 280, 

290, 338, 449, 462, 488, 489, 500, 

527. 
Cooperstown, New York, 181, 182, 

187. 
Copley, John Singleton, 71, 76, 240- 

242. 
" Copperheads," 459, 512. 
Cotton, John, 26, 32, 42, 44, 235, 288, 

311. John, the younger, 240. 
Cowper, William, 67, 201, 228, 508. 
Crevecoeur, 114, 115. 
Criticism, Literary, in America, 187, 

208-211, 400-401, 438, 458, 507. 
Cromwell, Oliver, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 

21, 24, 29, 31, 53, 107, 523. 
Cross, Dr. Arthur Lyons, in n. 
" Culture" in New England, 373. 
Curtis, George William, 222, 229, 

309. 455- 
Custom, see Law, Rights. 



■r\ANA, Charles Anderson, 305, 

308. 455- 
Dana, Richard Henry, 194. 
Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., 438. 
Dartmouth College, 248, 257, 264, 

408. 
Darwin, Charles, 148. 
Davies, Sir John, 41. 



" Decadence," in contemporary liter. 

ature, 189, 217, 477-479- 
Declaration of Independence, 76, 93, 

106, 113, 115,275,437,485. 
Decline of New England, 436-446, 

453- 
Defoe, Daniel, 20, 65, 66, 112. His 

" Robinson Crusoe," 387. 
Democracy in America, 108, 203, 235, 

236, 359. 362, 481, 509. 527-530; 
compared with European, 467-471, 
529; in England, 148, 525, 527; 
imperial, 525. See Aristocracy, 
Equality, Excellence, Liberty. 

Density of population, in its effect 
on character and history, 17, 33, 
89, 152, 278, 281, 306, 384, 463, 529. 
See Inexperience, Retardation. 

De Quincey, Thomas, 161, 193, 376. 

Derby, George Horatio, 510. 

Description, in American fiction, 
164-166, 175, 186, 189, 354, 488. 

" Dial," the, 300-305 ; 298, 308, 318, 
330, 342, 347, 370, 373. 436, 443. 
453- 

" Dial," the Chicago, 507. 

Dialect in American Writings, 401,' 
402, 477, SIX-513. 

Dialogue, as a literary form, 483-484. 

Dicey, A. V., 18 «. 

Dickens, Charles, 147, 171, 176, 206, 
502, 526, 528. 

Diplomacy, American Men of Let- 
ters in. See Everett, Irving, 
Lowell, Motley, Taylor, Willis. 

Disraeli, Benjamin, 228. 

Dissenters, English, 224, 288. See 
Methodism. 

Distinction, Personal, of American 
Men of Letters, 201-202, 203, 229, 

289, 315. 338, 509- 

Disunion of National Temper, of 
America and England, 9, 105-116, 
150, 153, 175, 182, 185, 187, 322- 
323, 525, 526; within America, 151, 
351,484, 505. 

Divinity School at Cambridge, 3T4. 

Dobson, Austin, 415. 

" Dooley, Mr.," 173, 



INDEX 



563 



Drake, Joseph Rodman, 195-196. 

Drama, the, 214; in America, 157- 
158,204,247,301,355,517-518; in 
England, 20, 23, 24, 298, 302. 

Dryden, John, 20, 21, 24, 25, 37, 38, 
40, 42, 54, 55, 65, 68, 69, 136, 484, 

523- 

Dudley, Joseph, 41, 357. 

Dudley, Thomas, 26, 32, 40. 

Dunlap, William, 158. His Life of 
Brockden Brown, 158-160. 

Dunster, Henry, President of Har- 
vard College, 43, 240. 

Duyckinck, Evert Augustus, his 
" Cyclopedia of American Litera- 
ture," 195, 208, 462. 

Dwight, John Sullivan, 305, 309, 438. 

D wight, Timothy, 120-123, 124, 129, 
181, 352. 



■p AST RIVER, the, 465, 472, 478. 

Eaton, Theophilus, 50, 51. 
Eccentricity in Literature, 466, 475- 

477- 

Education, Development of, in 
America, 235, 253-254, 258, 260- 
261, 262, 264-266, 271, 306, 329- 
33°> 394~395- ^^^ Classics, Har- 
vard, Law, Modern Languages, 
Smith Professorship, Theology, 
Yale, etc. 

Edwards, Jonathan, 83-91 ; 78, 80, 
92, 93. 95' 99, 102, 103, 120, 136, 
180, 240, 280, 285, 419, 422. 

Election, the doctrine of, 15, 48, 49, 
52, 84, 87-89, 100, 238, 239, 240, 
279. See Calvinism. 

Eliot, George, 147,154, 176, 526, 528. 

Eliot, John, 32, 37, 51. 

Elizabeth, Queen, 13, 21, 25, 26, 31, 
32,53,55,59,60,65,77, 126. 

Elizabethan England, see National 
Traits. 

Ellsler, Fanny, 209-210, 301. 

Emancipation Proclamation, 356. 

Embargo, Jefferson's, 193, 244, 429. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 31T-327; 
122, 206, 253-255, 260, 298, 300, 



301, 302, 303, 304, 306, 308, 310, 
328, 332, 335, 336, 337, 338, 371, 
372, 373, 376, 379, 395, 412, 425, 
426, 430, 432, 437, 438, 445, 469, 
485, 489, 528. 

Empire, the course of, 8-9, 30, 62, 
106, io8, 142-144, 149-153, 525. 

England, see History, Law, Litera- 
ture, National Traits. 

Enthusiasm, see National Traits. 

Episcopal Church, the Protestant, of 
the United States, 79, no, in, 
121, 184, 347, 442. 

Equality, the Ideal of, 362, 468-469, 
474, 529- See Democracy, Excel- 
lence, Right and Rights. 

Essays, English, 67, 118, 174; in 
America, 120, 124, 170, 317, 417, 
460, 498. 

Essex, Earl of, 18, 32. 

"Evening Post," the New York, 
193, 196, 198, 230, 449. 

Everett, Edward, 253-257 ; 170, 260, 
264, 271, 280, 291, 311, 371, 437, 

439, 485- 

Evolution, philosophy of, 16, 293, 
339- 

Excellence, the Ideal of, 467-469, 
471, 528, 530. See Democracy. 

Expansion of the United States, 149. 

Extracts from American writings : 
Barlow, 127-128 ; Bay Psalm Book, 
37-38 ; Anne Bradstreet, 40-41 ; 
Brockden Brown, 162, 164 ; Bryant, 
197-200; Channing, 277-278, 284- 
285, 341; W. G. Clark, 220; 
Crevecoeur, 114-1x5; Drake, 196; 
Dunlap, 158; Dwight, 120-123; 
Edwards, 84-89; Emerson, 253- 
254, 29S, 312-314, 316, 320-324; 
Everett, 256-257; Fields, 375; 
Franklin, 94-99, 101-102 ; Freneau, 
131-133; Halleck, 196; Hartford 
Wits, 128-129; P. H. Hayne, 492; 
Holland, 460 ; Holmes, 90-91 , 222- 
223, 411-415, 419-422, 438, 444; 
Hopkinson, 113-114; Irving, 172, 
175-176; Lanier, 496-498; Long- 
fellow, 387-389, 391-392 ; Lowell, 



564 



INDEX 



i86, 199, 339-340, 399. 402-403. 
405; C. Mather, 44, 49, 51-52; 
Otis, 108-109; Poe, 209-210, 212- 
216 ; Stedman, 385 ; B. Taylor, 457 ; 
Thoreau, 335-336; F. O. Tick- 
nor, 489-498 ; Timrod, 493-494 ; 
Trumbull, 124-126; Webster, 250- 
252 ; Whittier, 361-369 ; Whitman, 
470-475; Wigglesworth, 39-40; 
Willis, 223, 227 ; Woolraan, 80- 
81. 



I7AMILY Discipline in New Eng- 
land, 237. 

Faneuil Hall in Boston, 255, 349. 

Fashion in Boston, 225, 288. 

"Federalist," the, 118, 120, 135, 136. 

Felton, Cornelius Conway, 438, 439. 

Fiction, in the Evolution of Litera- 
ture, 5, 167, 190; in English Liter- 
ature, 66, 68, 90, 147-148, 160-161, 

176, 430-431. 477. 526-527; in 
America, 163-168, 179, 181-192, 
271, 272, 354-356, 417, 426, 460- 
461, 486, 487, 488-489, 498. See 
Short Stories. 

P'ielding, Henry, 66, 68, 160, 171. 

r'ields, James Thomas, 375-377 ; 
222, 438, 443-444- 

Fine Arts, the, 5, 296, 385, 416, 476, 
510. 

First church of Boston, 42, 288, 311. 

Fontenoy, Battle of, 60, 61. 

Forbes, John Murray, 43S, 439. 

Form, Sense of, in American Writers, 
166-167. 6'^(f Artistic Conscience. 

Fourier, 306-308. 

Foxe, John, 26. 

France, as enemy of England, 29-31, 
60-63, 73-74. 272; as friend of 
America, 63, 115, 150. See Revo- 
lution, Revolutionary Spirit. 

"Frankenstein," Mrs. Shelley's, 161, 

193- 
Franklin, Benjamin, 92-103; 79, 82, 
120, 136, 173, 233, 245, 268, 437, 
509 ; his Letter to a London news- 
paper, 173, 508. 



" Eraser's Magazine," 187. 
Freeman, James, 121-122, 281. 
" Freeman's Oath," 36. 
French and Indian Wars, 73, 274. 
Freneau, Philip, 130-135, 136. 
Fruitlands, Community at, 331, 333. 
Fuller, Sarah Margaret, 300-301 ; 

208, 229, 302, 304-306, 308, 331, 

371, 386, 455. 
Fuller, Thomas, 20, 23, 38, 54. 



QARRISON, William Lloyd, 342^ 
343. 348. 360. 

Gayarre, Charles fitienne, 486. 

Genealogy, American delight in, 
264. 

General Principles, American de- 
votion to, see Abstract Principles. 

George I., 59. 

George H., 54, 59, 66, 68, 74, 75, 79, 

524- 
George HI., 59, 60,62, 105, 116, 126, 

131, 139- 
George IV., 139. 
Georgia, 74, 481, 483, 484, 486, 489. 

491, 492, 495. 
German Learning, Influence of, in 

New England, 253, 264, 267, 268, 

271, 272, 275, 295-296. 
Gibbon, Edward, 67, 268, 275-276. 
" Godey's Lady's Book," 204, 207, 

219. 
Godkin, Edwin Lawrence, 439, 454. 
Godwin, Parke, 194. 
Godwin, William, 67, 68, 160-162, 

163, 184, 228, 488. 
Goethe, Taylor's translation of, 456, 

458. 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 66, 160, 171, 173, 

174, 184, 228, 276. 
Gray, Thomas, 66, 200. 
Great Awakening, the, 74-76, 110. 

See Whitefield. 
Greeley, Horace, 454-4555 229, 300, 

308. 
Greenfield, Connecticut, 12T, 123. 
Griswold, Rufus Wilmot, 195, 199, 

20S, 455, 462. 



INDEX 



56s 



pjAKLUYT'S "Voyages," 20,22, 
^^ 37- 

Hale, Edward Everett, 237. 

Half Way Covenant in the New 

England Churches, 86. 
Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 195, 196-197, 

208, 221. 
Hamilton, Alexander, 117, 118, 120. 
" Harper's Magazine," 453, 454. 
" Harper's Weekly," 229, 449, 453, 

454- 
Hartford, Connecticut, 52, 84, 123, 

124, 127, 360. 
Hartford Wits, the, 119-130, 135, 

136, 157- 

Harvard College, 26, 42-43, 44, 46, 
47, 48, 50, 75, 78, 79, 83, 93, 94, 
119, 120, 122, 129, 224, 235. 240, 
253. 25:5, 260, 261, 262, 264-265, 
267, 269, 271, 272, 273, 281, 288, 
3". 332, 346, 348, 350. 379-3S0, 
381. 393. 394, 395. 396, 398, 404. 
407, 408, 412-415. 443-445. 480. 

Haverhill, Massachusetts, 358, 360. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 425-435, 163, 
168, 176, 206, 240, 306, 308, 328, 

376, 377. 379. 438. 445. 471, 477. 
489, 516, 528. 

Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 486, 490- 
492, 499. 

Hayne, Robert Young, 252, 485, 490. 

Henry, Patrick, 112, 120. 

Herbert of Cherbury, Lord, 19, 32. 

Herndon's Life of Lincoln, 503. 

Hildreth, Richard, 272. 

Historical Continuity, 18, 29. 

Historical literature in America, 31, 
36, 42, 43, 78, 81, 119, 136, 171- 
173, 178-179. 245, 263-276, 338, 
378, 486, 528; in England, 37, 
119, 275 

History, American, of the Seven- 
teenth Century, 26-34; 42, 55, 70, 
77, 357, 523; of the Eighteenth 
Century, 70-77, 524 ; of the Nine- 
teenth Century, 149-153, 357, 525" 
526; in general, 530. 

History, English, of the Seventeenth 
Century, 13-19, 20, 29, 55, 357, 



522; of the Eighteenth Century, 
59-64, 524; of the Nineteenth 
Century, 139-144. 525- 

Hoar, Ebenezer Rockwood, 438. 

Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 208, 220. 

Holland, Josiah Gilbert, 459-461. 

Hollis Professorship at Harvard 
College, 281. 

Hollis Street Church in Boston, 
442. 

Holmes, Abiel, 288, 407. 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 407-424; 
65, 206, 221, 222, 229, 239, 376, 
377, 425, 426, 430, 443, 489, 508- 
509, 511, 528; his "Autocrat," 
241,444; his "Mortal Antipathy," 
222 ; his memoir of Motley, 437- 
438; his "One Hoss Shay," 90- 
91. 

" Home Journal," the, 226. 

Hooker, Richard, 4, 22, 37. 

Hooker, Thomas, 26, 84. 

Hopkinson, Francis, 11 2-1 15, 175, 
his " Battle of the Keys," 508. 

" Hudibras," see Butler. 

Human Nature, opposing views 
concerning; see Calvinism, Revo- 
lutionary Spirit, Unitarianism. 

Humanism in New England, 406. 

Humanity of Classical Literature, 
315-316. See Popularity. 

Hume, David, 66, 67. 

Humor, American, loi, 173, 179, 

507-513, 515, 518. 

Hunt, Leigh, 174, 224, 228. 

Hunt, William Morris, 438. 

Hutchinson, Thomas, 77, iro, 120, 
260 ; his " History of Massachu- 
setts," 82, 263. 



TDEALISM in America, 293-294, 

304. 310. 319-323, 371-372, 417, 
432, 524, 525, 529. See Mystery, 
Puritanism. 

Ideals, American devotion to Ab- 
stract, see Abstract Principles. 

Ideals, the National, of England and 
America, 8, 14, 18, 28, 46, 70, 82, 



S66 



INDEX 



io6, 190, 246, 521-530. Set Bible, 
Democracy, Law, Right and 
Rights, Union. 

Imitativeness in American Writings, 
38, 41, 54, "9> 130, 135. 162, 167, 
170, 173, 181, 184, 196, 224, 228, 
247, 253, 258-259, 262, 272, 372, 
386-387, 391, 480-481, 483, 489, 
491. See Style. 

Independence, Declaration of, see 
Declaration. 

India, the Empire of, 62, 142, 143. 

Indians, American, 31, 32, 73, 186, 
274, 505. 

Individualism, Growth of, in New 
England, 327, 330, 442-444- -See 
Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, Trans- 
cendentalism, Unitarianism. 

Inexperience, the National of Amer- 
ica, 34, 37, 55.77. 116, 13c, 136, 
153, 218, 279, 287, 327, 359, 362, 
384-385, 424, 446, 529. See Den- 
sity, Retardation. 

Innate ideas, 294, 300, 304. 

Instrumentof Government, the, 1 8, 28. 

Insularity of Modern England, 62, 
64, 69, 139-140. See John Bull. 

Irving, Washington, 169-180 ; 168, 
181, 184, 185, 189, 190, 191, 194, 
195, 201, 203, 221, 228, 229, 230, 
271, 276, 280, 290, 328, 432, 433, 
449, 462, 477, 509, 511, 516, 527. 

Isabella II., Queen, 169. 



JAMES I., 13. 
James II., 13, 59, 90. 
James, Henry, 438. 
Jamestown, Virginia, 28. 
Jay, John, 117, 120. 
Jefferson, Thomas, 106, 117, 120, 

149, 193. 485- 
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 237. 
"John Bull," 64, 112, 140, 175, 403, 

446, 524. 
Johns Hopkins University, 495, 496. 
Johnson, Samuel, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 

112, 117, 136, 253, 524, Boswell's 

Life of, 67, 157. 



Jonson, Ben, 20, 25. 
Journalism in America, see News- 
papers. 



I^EATS, John, 134, 145, 193, 195, 

526. 
Kennedy, John Pendleton, 486. 
King's Chapel, in Boston, 105, 

121-122, 178, 288; its "Liturgy," 

281. 
Kipling, Rudyard, 147, 516. 
Kirkland, Caroline Matilda, 208, 

229, 501-503. 
" Knickerbocker Gallery," 237, 466. 
" Knickerbocker Magazine," 374, 

386, 459, 514. 
"Knickerbocker School," the, 219- 

230; 280, 309, 338, 449, 465, 487, 

SIS- 



LAFAYETTE, I 15-116. 
Lamb, Charles, 67, 69. 

Landor, Walter Savage, 67, 69, 
197. 

Language and Nationality, 3, 8, 18, 
28, 82, 106, 521. See Ideals. 

Language, the English, 3, 8. 

Lanier, Sidney, 481, 486, 491, 495- 
499. 

Larcom, Lucy, 237. 

Law, the English or Common, 8, 14, 
17, 18, 19, 30, 46, 61, 62, 63, 64, 70, 
74, 82, 106, 108, 109, 116, 142-144, 
150, 190, 246, 274, 292, 298, 325, 
340, 373,467, 521-522, 524, 530. 

Law, the Profession of, in America, 
236, 246, 248-249, 251, 258, 260, 

274, 348, 35O' 378, 408, 415. 441; 
American Men of Letters as Stu- 
dents of, 169, 194, 264, 380, 393, 
408, 458, 485, 486, 487, 488, 491, 

495- 
Lectures in America, 247, 313, 314, 

315, 317, 325, 330, 456, 459, 511. 
Lee, Robert Edward, 151. 
Leland, Charles Godfrey, 222. 
Lewis, " Monk." 67, 68, 160, 163. 



INDEX 



567 



Liberalism, in New England, 42, 43, 
46, 119, 122, 224, 442. See Tran- 
scendentalism, Unitarianism. 

Liberty, the Ideal of, 273, 443, 467, 

530- 
" Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," 

467-468. 

Lieber, Francis, 486. 

Lincoln, Abraham, 151, 474, 503-504. 

Literature defined, 1-3 ; evolution 
of, 5; motives of, 191, 228, 309; 
permanent, 315; study and influ- 
ence of, in America. See Classics, 
Modern Languages. 

Literature in America, 9-10, 405, 
479; of the Seventeenth Century, 
35-43; 55. "9. 190. 246, 523; of 
the Eighteenth Century, 78-82 ; 
117-136; 190, 246, 525; of the 
Nineteenth Century, 154-518, 526- 

530- 

Literature, Elizabethan, see English 
of the Seventeenth Century. 

Literature, English, 4-6 ; of the 
Seventeenth Century, 20-25, 27, 
37, 55. 65, 69, 136, 146, 523 ; of the 
Eighteenth Century, 65-69, 136, 
146, 173-174, 200-201, 415-416, 
524; of the Nineteenth Century, 
145-148, 154, 201, 430-431. 526- 
529. 

Literature, " Queen Anne." See Eng- 
lish of the Eighteenth Century. 

Literature of the Regency. See 
English of the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury. 

Literature, Victorian. See English 
of the Nineteenth Century. 

London, 25. 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 378- 
392 ; 206, 209, 222, 296, 350, 376, 

377. 393. 394, 395- 396, 397. 39^. 

406, 418, 425, 426, 430, 438, 489, 

528. 
Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin, 486. 
Lord's Supper, in the New England 

Churches, 86, 312-313, 372, 379. 
Lounsbury, Thomas Raynesford, his 

Life of Cooper, 182, 183. 



Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, 149 «. 

Lowell, Charles, 393, 442. 

Lowell, James Russell, 393-406; 170, 
2g6, 222, 237, 262, 296, 376, 377, 
380-381, 414, 415, 418, 425, 426, 
430. 438, 465, 489, 509, 528 ; his 
" Biglow Papers," 477, 50S, 511; 
his " Fable for Critics," 185, 199, 
222, 400, 508 ; his essay on " Tho- 
reau," 339. 

Lowell, John, 438. 

Lower Classes of New England, 75- 
76, 102, 242, 332, 337-338, 348. 359. 
362, 396, 402, 425, 427, 481 ; of the 
South. See Slavery ; of the West, 
501-502. 

Loyalists, the American, 82, 107-108, 
no, 125, i8r, 241, 260, 381. 

Lyric Quality in Literature, 216; in 
Southern poetry, 495, 498, 499. 

" Lyrical Ballads," Wordsworth and 
Coleridge's, 68, 145, 159, 162, 189, 
191, 290. 



A/TACAULAY, Lord, 206, 268, 

^ ■*■ 526. 

Madison, James, 117, ii8, 120, 150. 

Magazines in America. See Periodi- 
cals. 

Maine, woods of, 334, 425, 429. 

Manufactures of New England, 152, 
244, 245, 249, 440. 

Marlborough, Duke of, 19, 21, 32, 
61, 62. 

Marlowe, Christopher, 207, 217. 

Marshall, John, 118, 120, 485. 

Mary Stuart, Queen, 26. 

Massachusetts, 26, 27, 28, 31, 45, 78, 
94, no, 120, 122, 192, 193, 234, 253, 
255, 262, 263, 278, 351, 356, 358, 
360, 450, 459, 510. 

Massachusetts Historical Society, 
31, 261, 262, 263, 267, 274. 

Materialism in New York, 451-454, 
463 ; throughout America, 468, 

505- 
Mather, Cotton, 44-54 ; 33, 35, 42, 
43. 70, 71, 75, 78, 82, 95, 136, 233. 



568 



INDEX 



245, 263, 279, 287, 288, 311,313, 

334, 409, 436-437. 439- 
Mather, Increase, 32, 43, 44, 45, 46, 

83. 95. 233. 261. 

Mather, Richard, 27, 32, t,'], 44. 

Medicine, the Profession of, in Amer- 
ica, 193, 236, 408-409. 

Melodrama, 213-214, 432. 

Melville, Hermann, 229. 

Merchants of New England, 71-73, 
76, 236, 237, 240-244, 439. 

Methodism, 66, 74-75, 97, 374. 

Mexican War, 401. 

Middle States, or Colonies, 157-230; 
36, 78, 79, 80, 154, 262, 291, 372, 
449. 463-464. 480, 526, 527. 

Milton, John, 20, 21, 23, 24, 37, 42, 
55, 65, 68, 69, 136, 387, 523. 

Minto, William, 206. 

" Mirror," the New York, 223, 225, 
226. 

Mitchell, Donald Grant, 222. 

Mitchill, Samuel Latham, his " Pic- 
ture of New York," 171, 172. 

Modern Languages and Literature, 
study and influence of, in America, 
264-265, 292, 296-297, 379-385. 
390, 393-396. See Smith Profes- 
sorship. 

Monroe Doctrine, the, 1 50-1 51. 

Moore, Thomas, 69, 193. 

Morris, George Pope, 225. 

Morse, John Torrey, Jr., his life of 
Holmes, 438. 

Motley, John Lothrop, 272-273; 170, 
280, 371, 376, 437, 438- 

Music, in New England, 296, 297, 309. 

"Mutual Admiration" in Boston, 

444- 
Mystery, Sense of, in America, 163, 
167, 179, 213, 214, 218, 418, 429, 
432- 



XTAPOLEON, 61, 62. 128-129, 

139. 140, ISO- 
Napoleon HL, 151. 
" Nasby, Petroleum V.," 512-513, 

515- 



" Nation," the, 453, 454. 

Nationality, in general, 3. See Lan- 
guage ; of America, 77. See Ideals. 

National Traits of Elizabethan Eng- 
land (Spontaneity, Enthusiasm, 
and Versatility), 19, 21-24, 25, 27, 
64, 67, 69, 522 ; evident in America, 
28, 33. 53. 55. 75-77, III. "2, 115, 
131. 332, 445-446, 522-524. 529- 

Nature, Sense of, in American Books, 

273. ZZZ-TjI. 361-363. 389. 493. 
497-498- See Description. 

Navy, the American, i8i, 244. 

Negro Minstrel Shows, 510. 

Nelson, Lord, 62, 68, 139, 145. 

Newburyport, 343, 360. 

New England, 26, 27, 28-34, 35-43, 
45-53. 55. 70-76, 78-79. 108, 152, 
154, 190, 221, 226, 229, 230, 233- 
446, 449, 455, 462, 465, 471, 480, 

489. 493. 501. 504, 513. 514. 523. 

526, 528-530. 
" New England Primer," 36. 
New Hampshire, 248, 249, 253, 360, 

455- 

New Haven, 51, 84, 120, 124. 

New Jersey, 80, 130, 181, 466. 

Newman, Cardinal, 526, 528. 

New Orleans, 73, 233, 486. 

Newspapers in America, 79, 157, 183, 
187, 193, 201, 202, 209, 211, 225- 
226, 229, 230, 309, 342, 360, 365, 
400, 449, 455, 458, 507-513, 514- 
515,517,518. 

Newton, Sir Isaac, 25, 32. 

New York, 79, 114, 120, 130, 154, 
157, 163, 182, 190, 191, 192-197, 
201, 204, 205, 210, 219, 225, 226- 
230, 233, 234, 262, 2S0, 290, 308, 
309. 338, 372, 374. 405. 449-464, 
465-466, 472, 478-479. 489. 501 » 
504, 505, 513, 514, 515. 

Nile, Battle of the, 60, 61, 62, 68, 

139. 145. 146- 
" North American Review," the, 194, 

197, 255, 262, 267,' 272, 291, 302, 

370, 404, 436, 443, 453. 
North and South, Divergence of, in 

America, 27-2S, 151, 495. See 



INDEX 



569 



Antislavery Movement, Civil 

\\ ar, Disunion. 
Nurthampton, Massachusetts, 83, 85, 

86, 87, 240. 
Norton, Charles Eliot, 262, 
Nova Scotia, 29, 73! 
Novel, the English. See Fiction. 



QDYSSEV, the, 166, 477. 

Old Soutli Church in Boston, 
224, 247, 263, 2S8. 

Orations and Poems in New Eng- 
land, 412, 414. 

Oratory in America, 108-109, i^-» 
135, 245, 246-2 s9, 260, 262, 270, 
275, 276, 277, 290, 291, 338, 346- 
351. 371, 372, 439> 443, 485, 486, 
528. 

" Orthodoxy " in New England, 120- 
123, 223-224, 2S8-289, 291, 318, 
379, 407-40S, 418-423. See Cal- 
vinism, Edwards, Mather, Puri- 
tanism, Unitarianism. 

Osgood, Frances Sargent, 209-210, 
301. 

Otis, James, 10S-109, no, 112, 120, 
247, 260. 

Ovid. See Sandys. 



pALFREY, John Gorham, 272. 

Pamphleteering, 112, 119. 
Pancoast, H. S., his " Introduction 

to American Literature," 485-487, 

490. 
Panic of 1857, 450. 
Park Street Church in Boston, 224, 

225. 
Parker, Theodore, 346-348 ; 258, 302, 

304,308, 352, 366,371,439. 
Parkman, Francis, 273-274; 29, 73, 

280, 371, 438. 
Patriotic verse in America, 120, 125, 

127, 131, 193. See F. O. Ticknor, 

Timrod, Whittier. 
Paulding, James Kirke, 195. 
Payne, John Howard, 1 58. 
Peabody, Andrew Preston, 262, 287. 



Pearson, Eliphalet, 282. 

Pedantry in New England, 326, 397. 

Peirce, Benjamin, 438. 

Pepys, Samuel, 19, 32. 

Periodical Literature in America, 79, 
157, 159, 205, 219, 262, 301-304, 
370-377, 404, 449, 453-454, 515- 
517. See Newspapers. 

Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard 
College, 194, 255, 313, 412. 

Philadelphia, 78, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98, 
112, 120, T30, 159, 165, 205, 233, 
234, 261, 360, 451. 

Phillips, Wendell, 348-350 ; 258,352, 
366, 371, 439. 

Phillips, Willard, 194. 

Philosophy in New England. See 
Idealism, Transcendentalism. 

Phips, Sir William, 33, 45, 50, 73. 

" Phoenix, John," 510-511, 512, 515. 

Pierce, Franklin, 378, 425, 426. 

Pierrepont, Sarah (Mrs. Edwards), 
84-85. 

Pinckney, Edward Coate, 486. 

Pioneers, Western, 500-501. 

Pitt. See Chatham. 

Plan of this book, 10. 

Plots in, American Fiction, 185, 188, 
189, 354, 488. 

Plymouth Colony, 26, 28, 31, 240, 
244, 255-256, 263, 288. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 204-218; 163, 168, 
177, 219, 228, 230, 280, 30T, 335, 
338, 386, 432, 433, 449, 477, 486, 
516; his "Literati," 220, 487, 
501. 

Poetry, in the Evolution of Liter- 
ature, 5, 167 ; in America, 38-41, 
90-91, 1 19-134, 186, 191, 192-203, 

206, 209-210, 2II-216, 220, 22[, 

223, 226, 227, 230, 304, 316, 317, 
361-369, 375, 378-392, 398-403, 
410-415, 443, 457-458, 46X, 465-. 
479, 481, 489-498, 516, 528; in 
England, 5, 21-24, 37, 38, 65, 66, 
145-148, 154, 200, 291, 310, 526, 
527, 528. 
Poetry, Theories of, Bryant's, 198; 
Lanier's, 496; Poe's, 211. 



S70 



INDEX 



Political Literature in America, 78, 
81, 112, 1 1 7-1 19, 136, 180, 190, 209, 
228, 245, 246, 247, 459, 485, 513, 

525- 

Pope, Alexander, 32, 65, 119, 136,415. 

Popularity, as a quality of Litera- 
ture, 509-510. See Humanity. 

Portland, Maine, 223, 378. 

Portraits, family, 71, 76, 240-242. 

Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 248, 

375- 

Precocity in literature, 197, 360. 

Prescott, William Hickling, 268-271 ; 
267, 272, 275, 280, 371, 438; his 
Life of Brockden Brown, 159, 160. 

Present Time, the, 514-518. 

Prince, Thomas, his " Annals," 263. 

Princeton College, 79, 83, 85, 130. 

Printing-presses in America about 
1800, 157. 

Prohibition in America, 103, 506. 

Property, Right of, 340, 344, 345, 346, 
356. 

Prose, in the Evolution of Litera- 
ture, 5, 167; in America, 44-52, 
78-82, 84-89, 94-101, 162-164, 172- 
176, 191, 206-214, 216, 222-223, 
226, 230, 246-276, 312-314, 320- 
324, 335-33f>. 353-355. 404-405, 
417-420, 422, 425-435. 459-461, 
466, 4S3, 4S8, 507-513, 514-518, 
528 ; in England, 5, 22-25, y], 53, 
65, 66, 146-148, 154, 174, 184, 201, 
206, 526, 527, 528. 

Protestantism, 70. See Liberalism. 

Public Speaking, Popularity of, in 
New England, 246-249, 255, 317. 

"Puck," 453,461. 

Puritanism, in England, 14, 20, 24, 

25, 29. 31. 33. 107, 517. 523 ; i" New 
England, 28-31, t,t„ 38, 42, 44, 46, 

48, 50, 52, 55, 70, 74, 75, 95, I02, 

120, 163, 184, 294, 296, 299, 309, 
310. 371-372, 416, 423, 429, 430, 
432-433. 434, 446, 469, 523, 524, 
525, 529. See Calvinism. 
Purity of Temper, Instinctive in 
America, 189, 217, 218, 276, 307, 
310, 327, 405, 424, 434, 445-446, 517. 



2UAKERISM in America, 75, 80- 
81, 299, 341, 358, 36s, 367, 455, 
465. 
"Quality" in New England, See 

Aristocracy. 
" Quarterly Review," 192, 262. 
Quebec, 73 ; Battle of, 60, 61, 62, 74. 



OADCLIFFE, Mrs., 67; her 
■*-^ "Mysteries of Udolpho," 68, 

160, 161, 163. 
Railways, transcontinental, 1 52, 440 ; 

in New England, 244, 440. 
Ralegh, Sir Walter, 4, 18, 21, 22, 24, 

27, 32, 37. 131- 
RationaHsm in New England, 417- 

420. 
Raymond, Henry Jarvis, 455. 
Refinement in American writings, 

180, 203, 218, 228. 
Reform Bill of 1832, 107, 140-141, 

145, 146, 148, 198, 220, 290, 525, 

526. 
Reformers in New England, 229, 245, 

300, 303, 304-305, 338, 339-340, 

359. 371, 372, 398, 416, 441, 528. 

See Antislavery Movement, Brook 

Farm. 
Regency, of George IV., 139, 147. 
Relaxation of Social Pressure in 

America, 33, 53, 89, 102, 501. See 

Density, Inexperience. 
Religion in New England. See Cal- 
vinism, Puritanism, Unitarianism. 
Religion and Life, in America, 90, 

95-100, 102-103. 
Religious literature in America. See 

Theological. 
Renaissance, of Europe, 17, 178,245, 

259, 297, 394. 
Renaissance of New England, the, 

233-446; 154, 206, 245, 258-259, 

303, 372, 429-430, 469, 514, 528- 

530- 
Representation, conflicting theories 

of, 107, 116. 
Restoration, the, 13, 21, 24, 29, 31, 

523- 



INDEX 



571 



Retardation of Development in 
America, 32, 123, 126, 130, 151, 
174, 201, 275-276, 357, 416, 446, 
483, 484, 489, 522-529. See Den- 
sity, Inexperience. 

Reversion, Social, in America, 504. 

Revolution, the American, 104-116; 
63. 67, 71, TZ> 75. 76, 79. 81, 103, 
117, 121, 130, 134, 152, 160, 169, 
172, 175, 180, 185, 204, 240-242, 
247, 253, 258, 260, 268, 346, 382, 

437, 481, 484. 485, 524-525- 
Revolution, the Constitutional, in 
England, 140, 144, 148. See Re- 
form Bill. 
Revolution, the French, 61, 63, 115- 
116, 140, 310, 345, 467, 471; its 
abstract philosophy, 63-64, 109, 
467 ; its rationalism, 66, 161, 417, 
423, See Revolutionary Spirit. 
Revolution of 1688, the, 13, 21, 29, 

523- 

Revolutionary Spirit, its view of 
Human Nature, 102, 145-146, 186, 
300, 332, 339, 443, 467, coo, 528- 
529 ; its contrasting manifestations, 
in England and France, 68, 145 ; 
in Europe and America, 290-293, 
310. See Transcendentalism, Uni- 
tarianism. 

Rhetoric in New England, 248, 253- 
257. 259, 270, 404. 

Rhodes, James Ford, his " History 
of the United States," 351. 

Richardson, Samuel, 66, 68, 160. 

Richmond, Virginia, 204, 205, 341. 

Right and Rights, English and 
American Ideal of, 8, 14, 64, 115- 
116, 467, 521, 524, 525, 529; Di- 
vergence of, see Disunion, 
American Revolution ; French 
ideal of, 63, 109-110; see Revolu- 
tionary spirit. 

Ripley, George, 229, 286, 302, 303, 
305, 308, 455. 

Roe, Edward Payson, 461. 

Rogers, Samuel, 67, 69. 

Romanticism, 431-432 ; in America, 
162-163, I74-I7S» 177, 179, 195. 



200, 203, 310, 334, 384-387, 390- 
391, 416-417. 432-434. 488-489, 
496, 498, 529; in England, 145- 
146, 160-161, 174, 526, 527, 529. 

Ross, David Locke, 512. 

Rumford, Count, 261. 

Ruskin, John, 147, 431, 526, 528. 

Ryland's " Chronological Outlines 
of English Literature," 20 w., 22, 
35 «•. 60. 



gT. LOUIS, 73, 233. 451- 

Salem, 244, 251, 425, 426, 429, 

See Witchcraft. 
San Domingo, Insurrection in, 345, 

482. 
Sandys, George, his translation of 

Ovid, 27, 36, 484. 
San Francisco, 233, 451. 
Satire in America, 90-91, loi, 113, 

119, 122-126, 130, 193, 196, 4oo~ 

403,411, 420-421, 459, 508, 512- 

513- 
Saturday Club of Boston, 376-377, 

437-439. 444- 
Scholarship in New England, 245, 
260-276, 277, 290, 291, 295, 326, 

338, 347. 371. 393-397. 443, 528. 

Science, English, 25, 148 ; in Amer- 
ica, see Cotton Mather, Franklin. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 67, 134, 145, 146, 
147, 148, 183, 184, 185, 189, 190, 
191, 192, 193, 198, 220, 230, 290, 
481, 488, 529 ; his " Waverley Nov- 
els," 146, 154, 174, 184, 526; his 
" Lady of the Lake," 389. 

" Scribner's Magazine," 453, 454, 

459- 
" Scriptures " in New England, 303, 

314. 7,^'^^ 331. 372, 445- 
Sea, American Books about the. 

See Cooper, Dana, Melville. 
Seabury, Samuel, no, in. 
Secession, 105, 255. See Civil War 

in America, Disunion. 
Second Church of Boston, 44, 71, 

288,311-313, 326. 
Sedgmoor, Battle of, 59. 



5/2 



INDEX 



Sentimentality in Literature, 200- 

201. See Romanticism. 
Sewall, Samuel, 31, 32, 33, 246, 341 ; 

his Diary, 234, 236, 263. 
Seward, William Henry, 222. 
Shakspere, 4, 5, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 

27. 32, 37. 41, 42, 50. S5.65, 68,69, 

136, 184, 217, 248, 253, 302, 315, 

445. 458. 469, 523- 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 146, 147, 
160, 161, 165, 174, 193, 291, 526, 

527- 

Shepard, Thomas, 52. 

Short Stories as a Form of Litera- 
ture, 16S, 174, 176-177, 191, 211- 
214, 226, 237, 430-434, 461, 477. 
486, 506, 515-518. See Fiction. 

Sibley, John Langdon, his" Harvard 
Graduates," 47. 

Sidney, Sir Philip, 26. 

Simms, William Gilmore, 480, 486, 
487-4S9, 491, 492. 

Slavery, Negro, 151, 340-346, 482. 
See Antislavery Movement. 

Smith, Captain John, 35, 484. 

Smith Professorship at Harvard 
College, 264-265, 266, 296, 379- 
381, 393, 406. See Longfellow, J. 
R. Lowell, George Ticknor. 

Smollett, Tobias, 66, 68. 

Socialism in New England. See 
Brook Farm. 

Social Relations of American Men 
of Letters, Abroad, 170, 225, 264, 
350, 396; at Home, 181, iS3, 206, 
228, 338, 376,408-410, 465, 5ti- 
512. See Distinction. 

Society, Structure of American, in 
New England, 71-73, 75, 92-94, 
193, 224, 234-244, 248, 258, 266, 
288, 326, 371, 378, 410, 436-441, 
481 ; in the South, 206, 481-483, 
487-488. 

South, the, 151, 152, 341, 356-357, 
480-499, 504, 513. 514- See North 
and South. 

South Carolina, 234, 351, 489; Nul- 
lification in, 19S, 4S7, 491. See 
Charleston. 



" Southern Literary Messenger," 
205, 219, 486. 

Southey, Robert, 61, 67. 

Spain, American delight in the 
romance of, 177-178, 270-271, 
272; war with, in 1S98, 150, 152. 

Sparks, Jared, 262, 267-268, 270, 
273, 284 ; his " Library of Ameri- 
can Biography," 159, 268. 

" Spectator," the, 66, 79, 94, 95, 118, 
120, 124. 

Spenser, 4, 5, 26, 27. 

Spontaneity. See National Traits. 

" Springfield Republican," the, 459. 

Stedman, Edmund Clarence, his 
"Poets of America," 385, 415, 
416, 417. 

Stedman and Hutchinson's " Library 
of American Literature," 35 «., 
123, 157, 195, 208, 220, 341, 460, 
461, 481, 492, 508. 

Stedman and Woodberry's edition 
of Poe, 207, 208, 212. 

Steele, Sir Richard, 65, 167. 

Stelligeri, 414 «. 

Stephens, Alexander Hamilton, 
483-484. 

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 147, 176, 
229, 527. 

Stoddard, Richard Henry, 222. 

Stoddard, Solomon, 83, 86. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 352-356 ; 
366, 371 ; her " Old Town Folks," 
237 ; her " Uncle Tom's Cabin," 
388. 

Struggle for existence, 16, 17, 18, 33, 

53- 
Stuart, Gilbert, 64, 241-243, 248, 

345- 

Style, Literary, in America, 38, 41, 
53. 95, loi, 162,166, 173, 175, 177, 
183, 193. 197, 199, 201, 211, 216, 
226, 250-253, 257, 267, 269-270, 
272, 274, 276, 323-324, 335-336, 
354, 363. 390, 397, 404, 428, 459, 
471, 473-478, 492,495. 498,507- 
See Dialect, Extracts. 

Sumner, Charles, 170, 258, 348, 350- 
351.352,371,387.438,483. 



INDEX 



' 573 



Surrey, Earl of, 38. 

Survival of the fittest, 17. 

Swift, Jonathan, 65, 112, 136, 172. 



"TPATLER," the, 66, 79, 118. 

" Taxation without Represen- 
tation," 107. 

Taylor, Bayard, 222, 229, 455-458. 

Taylor, Father, 373. 

Taylor, Jeremy, 20, 23. 

Teaching, Professional, by.--Men of 
Letters, 380, 395, Tffj^' See Long- 
fellow, Lowell, Ticknor. 

Temple, Sir William, 25, 40. 

Tennyson, 147, 209, 526, 528. 

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 
147, 176, 206, 415, 526. 528. 

Theocracy, in England, 17; in New 
England, 42, 44-46, 48, 70, 83, 95, 
235. See Calvinism, Puritanism. 

Theological literature in America, 
36, 41, 43- 78, 80, 83-91, no, 119, 
121, 122, 123, 136, 180, 190, 209, 
228, 246, 247, 263, 274, 292, 325, 
437. S23> 525; in England, 37, 
119. 

Thoreau, Henry David, 332-337 ; 
302, 328, 338, 339, 371, 376, 398, 
489. 

Ticknor, Francis Orrery, 489-490, 
499. 

Ticknor, George, 264-267 ; 170,268, 
270, 271, 280, 296, 371, 379-381, 
393. 395' 406, 418, 437- 

Timrod, Henry, 486, 491, 492-495, 

497. 499- 
Town Histories in New England, 

264. 
Tories, see Loyalists. 
Trafalgar, Battle of, 62, 139. 
Transcendentalism in New England, 

290-310; 245, 311, 324, 330, 333, 

338-340, 346, 347, 359, 371. 372, 

379, 384.. 386. 416, 418, 429. 432. 

441, 485, 528. See Revolutionary 

.Spirit. 
Translations of American books, 

183, 207. 



Translations in Elizabethan litera- 
ture, 5, 20, 22, 27, 484 ; in Ameri- 
ca, 198, 391, 456, 458. 

Trent, W. P., 4S0, 487-48S, 491. 

" Tribune," the New York, 229, 
230, 300, 308, 309, 449, 454-455, 
456. 

Trollope, Anthony, 176. 

Trollope, Mrs., 502, 503. 

Trumbull, John, 123-126; 120, 129. 

Tudor, William, 262. 

Twain, Mark, loi, 173,271,508,513"; 
his " Huckleberry Finn," 342, 477, 

503- 
Tyler, Moses Coit, 35 «., 40; his 
" Literary History of the Ameri- 
can Revolution," 104, 107, 112, 
134. 485- 



TTNION, the ideal of, 105, 151, 

345- 

Unitarianism in New England, 277- 
289; 90, 122, 224, 245, 267, 273, 
290, 291, 292, 295, 299, 303, 304, 
308, 309, 311, 314, 326, 338, 341. 
342, 346, 347, 353, 359, 3717 372, 
379. 384. 393- 407-409, 418-419. 
422, 441-442, 443, 528. See Re- 
volutionary Spirit. 

United States, 6, 7, 29, 127, 149-153, 
169. See Constitution, Law. 

Universities, the Office of, 383. 

University of Pennsylvania, 79, 93. 



■yERSATILITY, see National 
^ Traits. 

Victoria, Queen, 139, 141, 142, 144, 
154, 169, 511, 525, 526. 

Virginia, 26, 27, 35, 37, 108, 120, 
152, 190, 204, 206, 234, 481, 484, 
485, 487, 523 ; University of, 204. 

Voltaire, 99, 115, 423. 



WALTON, Tzaak, 20, 23, 31, 37. 

War of 1812, 150, 160, 244. 
!' Ward, Artemus," 511-512, 515. 



574 



INDEX 



Ward, Nathaniel, his "Simple 

Cobbler of Agawam," 508. 
Ware, Henry, 282. 
Ware, Henry, Jr., 311. 
Warren, Joseph, 247, 260. 
Washington, George, 64, 76, 92, 117, 

120, 151, 268, 357, 485; Weems's 

Life of, 159. 
Washington, City of, 233, 451, 466. 
Waterloo, Battle of, 61, 140, 145, 146, 

525-526. 
Wealth in New England, 71-73, 242, 

248-249, 378, 440 ; in New York, 

463; in the West, 441. 
Webster, Daniel, 247-253, 255, 257, 

280, 291, 354, 371, 437, 439, 485. 

491; Whittier's poems on, 367-369. 
Welde, Thomas, 37. 
Wesley, John, 66, 74. 
West, the, 500-51 3; 30,152,441,514. 
West Church of Boston, 442. 
West Point Military Academy, 205. 
Whigs of Massachusetts, 249, 255, 

257. 
Whipple, Edwin Percy, 438. 
Whitcomb's " Chronological Out- 
lines of American Literature," 35, 

36,78,461. 
White, Richard Grant, 458-459. 
Whitcfield, George, 74, 75, 97-99. 
Whitman, Walt, 464, 465-479. 
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 358-369, 

388-389; 197, 237, 371, 376, 425, 

426, 430, 438, 460, 465, 481, 489, 

493. 495, 509, 528. 



Wigglesworth, Michael, 36, 39, 78. 

Wilkins, Mary Eleanor, 237. 

William III., 7, 13, 25, 32, 33, 45, 53, 
SS> 59. 60, 79, 357. 

William IV., 139, 140, 141, 143, 
147. 

Williams College, 193, 461. 

Williams, Roger, 27, 32, 50, 77. 

Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 222-230; 
207, 208, 280, 288, 449. 

Wills, George Stockton, 480. 

Winslow, Edward, 26, 32. 

Winsor, Justin, his " Memorial His- 
tory of Boston," 287. 

Winthrop, John, 26, 31, 32, 50, 77, 
357; his History, 31, 263. 

Winthrop, Professor John, 261. 

Winthrop, Robert Charles, 258, a8o, 

439- 
Wirt, William, 485. 
Wister, Owen, 504. 
Witchcraft at Salem, 33, 45-46. 
Wood worth, Samuel, 195. 
Woolman, John, 80-81, 299. 
Wordsworth, William, 67, 69, 145, 

146, 162, 174, 201, 228, 291, 399, 

526, 527. 
World's Fair of 1893, 505-506. 



VALE COLLEGE, 75, 78, 79, 83, 
120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 129, 
181, 224, 225, 352, 407, 486. 
Yellow Fever in New York, 163-164, 
"Youth's Companion," thej 224. 



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